Our slightly tangential question today is, why are people so irrational about marriage? There have been cultures and times when legal marriage was important, and others when it was not. But there will always be people who are convinced that marriage is somehow a magic bullet for our social problems. Missives such as this one from otherwise intelligent columnists (in this case Emily Yoffe) show how weighed down with the baggage of "morality" the issue of marriage is. Yes, morality is involved; unfortunately, it is the definition of what morality is that gets confused and leads to calls for laws and policy that treat symptoms, rather than the underlying condition.

But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.

Yes, there are extremist meddlers who think truly personal choices should be legislated because God said so. But anyone who actually thinks that everyone living in society should be free to make all kinds of choices that negatively impact society is an extremist in the opposite direction. After all, morality actually is a mechanism for individuals living in societies to interact positively with other members of society, so that they will interact positively with you, which is all to your benefit. Society breaks down when personal desires and needs always take precedence over those of others. Once a critical number of people ignore the children they have and just keep on making more, there is no incentive to do otherwise because everyone is just out for himself anyway - the mark of a dysfunctional society.

Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.

Of course, since we don't have any single-mom laboratory manipulation studies, the only information we have is correlational, not causal. Very likely a lot of the single moms were poor before they had a kid, and in no position to raise one successfully - meaning to produce a contributing member of society, rather than a drain on it who will likely not raise kids successfully because she does not have the experience to know what that means. But the problem is not that the moms aren't married to the kids' fathers, it is that they had kids at all.

Yoffe points out that "one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a husband." But she is misdirected by her own definition of "husband," which in her mind, means a legally married man. She would be absolutely right if she defined "husband" as a man committed to one woman, emotionally and financially. When two people are able to commit to each other over the long term, they are much more likely to be successful parents, because they understand how society works - through the establishment and maintenance of relationships which in turn produces "moral" behavior. Thus they can raise their children to understand the importance of relationships, which is the key to avoiding dysfunctional behavior.

Marriage itself is actually a different issue altogether - or at least it would be if meddling politicians didn't think it was government's job to legislate morality. But the only true way to legislate morality is to remove dysfunctional people from society - which we pretty much do (albeit imprecisely) with laws against destructive behavior such as murder, theft, etc. Unfortunately tax code, welfare law, benefits rules, etc. put married people in a different economic category than unmarried people, which depending on your situation, either encourages you or discourages you to be married. Thus marriage is often driven by legal rather than personal considerations.

Marriage should be an entirely personal, not legal, decision. All the arguments about gay marriage are absurd because the idea that two people cannot declare themselves "married" if they want to is absurd. The reason that gays feel they have to fight for marriage is because policy makers have forced them to. If people don't want gays to be legally "married" then fine; fix the system so that there is no benefit to being married. If people want to avoid legal problems to do with benefits, alimony, inheritance, end-of-life issues, etc., there is all kinds of paperwork they can fill out. Legal marriage itself does not solve all of these problems anyway, so it is not clear why it exists, other than to legislate someone's particular "morality" that is not true morality.

In any case, you cannot legislate emotional commitment. The fact of "marriage" can make it easier to hide or ignore lack of long term emotional commitment, which can in turn lead to unwanted children anyway. Yoffe, as a child of bitter divorce, understands enough to know that marriage just for the sake of marriage makes no sense; but she seems to think that for a truly emotionally committed couple, marriage will somehow make their kids turn out better. But what is it that the kids have for their role model? The actual day-to-day relationship of their parents, or the certificate in their safe-deposit box? Those who argue that the legal hurdle of divorce will somehow force people to reconcile who might have otherwise split up has not checked divorce rates lately. If the emotional commitment is gone, no mere piece of paper is going to conjure it up again.

Save marriage for a symbol of personal commitment. To ceremonially bond with another human certainly has the impact of saying to society that "we are engaging in society through our relationship to each other." Therefore marriage certainly has societal value. But legally, it continues to be a pointless exercise at best and at worst confuses people about what is actually important.

Don't blame lack of marriage for the plight of poor neglected kids. Blame the parents who should have used birth control. The way to solve a lot of societal problems is to sterilize immediately anyone who has shown him or herself to be an unfit parent after the first kid. But we could never do that. It would be immoral.

Labels: humans, morality, sociality

Apparently it has been an assumption for a long time in some circles that early sex by teenagers results in their later delinquency. Two recent papers demonstrate just how muddled this theory is (along with most theories generalizing about human behavior), because they differ in their conclusions based on how the data were analyzed. The first paper's ( Armour, S. and D.L. Haynie, 2007. Adolescent sexual debut and later delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence 36:141-152) purpose was to use data to support the theory, which it does. The second paper (Harden, K.P., J. Mendle, J. E. Hill, E. Turkheimer and R.E. Emery, 2008. Rethinking timing of first sex and delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence, in press) uses the same dataset to reach the opposite conclusion, that earlier sex reduces future delinquency.

The second group of authors of course claim that their analysis is the better one, and in this case it is true. These papers, in fact, are a good demonstration of one of the major problems of large-dataset human studies, which is that they only control for factors (in this case, survey responses about race, income, parent's education, GPA, drug use, etc.) that the researchers imagine could affect the data, and not all the other hundreds of factors that also could but are ignored out of practicality or researcher bias. The authors' hope is that their use of a giant dataset will obscure the fact that important information is lacking.

(Once again, we will put aside the first major problem of such studies, the use of self-reporting data. Of course since both groups of authors rely on them, neither mentions how unreliable they are, especially, one might assume, with regard to sexual experience. And one might also imagine that the group of people who are most likely to lie about sexual experience is teenagers.)

The reason the second study is the better analysis is because the authors recognize that pooling all the data loses important information. Meaningless averages are calculated by pooling teenagers from all cultures and walks of life. To a repeat a very nice analogy used by the authors of the second paper: if you wish to correlate meat consumption with life expectancy, and you compare two countries, one primarily meat-eating and another not, you find a positive relationship - higher meat-eating correlates with higher life expectancy. But a third ignored variable also correlates positively with meat-eating, and that is level of industrialization. So to truly understand the relationship between meat-eating and life expectancy, you must control for industrialization. When the analysis is rerun within one country, the correlation between meat-eating and life expectancy is negative.

In addition, what is found in both papers is simply correlation, not causation (a trap that first-year undergraduates are taught to avoid, and yet catches so many human-behavior researchers). That is, the only information one has after the meat study is that meat-eating is associated with lower life expectancy. The study has not shown that meat-eating causes lower life-expectancy.

These were the two main problems with the first paper. The authors pool individuals across a wide range of cultural norms, which gives them a spurious result, and then conclude that early teen sex causes delinquency when the two are only correlated. Even though they use a crude control for cultural influence (average reported age of first sex for a given teenager's high school) they ignore any potential unstudied factor that could cause both (just as industrialization causes both higher life expectancy, and more meat-eating), obscuring the results for individuals.

The second paper solves that problem by analyzing only the identical twins in the dataset (which was large enough for them to have data for 289 twin pairs), and therefore controlling for both genetics (which the twins share exactly) and environment (which twins living in the same household largely share). This is an appropriate twin analysis because (for this main point at least) the authors don't care about trying to separate genetics and environment to answer their question. (Twin studies that do confound objective data with subjective assumptions.)

On top of all this, though, is another major flaw in the dataset, which the second group of authors strangely acknowledge despite their analysis. The supposedly "independent" (time of first sex) and "dependent" (delinquency) variables are by definition related from the start, because in much of American society, teen sex itself is considered delinquent behavior. What they are doing is a bit like asking whether or not shoplifting is correlated with delinquency. This certainly confounds the first study.

What does it mean that the second study found that identical twins who have their first sexual experience earlier than their siblings are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior? The authors seem to feel they have no choice but to conclude that there is probably no relationship between these factors at all. Perhaps that is exactly what they would have found statistically if they had used a Bonferroni correction for their dozen or so analyses. Either that, or delinquency is caused by sexual frustration, and the problem of misbehaving teens is now solved.

Labels: behavior, environment, humans, morality, statistics

A recent article about research supporting a neurological (= biological) basis for altruism panders to the alarmist view that behavior with an identifiable biological basis precludes personal responsibility, and could throw our criminal justice system into an uproar.

The first statement that shows an ignorance of sociobiology and evolution:

The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

Why is this unexpected? In social animals, such a biological basis for morality would absolutely be expected. This is because morality governs social interactions, so animals who have evolved in the context of sociality have a biological need for it. Altruism is related to empathy, without which we cannot interact socially because we need a mechanism for assessing what another person is thinking or feeling. Those without empathy, such as autistics, are lost in the maze of unspoken rules that govern interpersonal interactions. Altruism is a way of acting on empathic information.

...some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

The idea that "morality is somehow degraded" because it has a biological basis really has no logic to it, but it is typical of those who confuse morality with religion. Perhaps the idea is analogous to someone we like doing something nice versus someone we do not like doing it. In the latter case we assume insidious motives because we do not believe the person is truly being altruistic. But the mistake there is that there is no such thing as pure altruism, as research shows. Either altruistic acts cause us to receive tangible benefits, such as increased standing in a community, or if anonymous, provide us with pleasure (Moll et al., 2006).

Of course morality and altruism are complex neurologically because human social interactions are complex. But a biological explanation for moral behavior does not indicate a lack of need of philosophers or even religious thinkers who study moral behavior such as altruism. Humans are faced with ethical decisions nearly every day, and it is not always clear what is the altruistic way to respond, even if that is our goal. That is why religious advisors, analysts, and advice columnists are not automatically out of a job just because automatic brain function reveals our options. Our brains often do not make obvious the decisive course of action, that is, the course of action having the most positive or least negative social consequences, in the balance. Social consequences are a real biological phenomenon, because decisions affecting an individual's social standing often affect that of an entire family, which shares genes.

For example, there is the potential problem of revealing or not revealing a friend's indiscretions, such as an extramarital affair. In the short term, revealing the truth might be bad for the social group, as bonds are broken. But in the long term, the earlier such a truth is revealed, the quicker wounds may heal and the social group rebuilt. Such a decision is necessarily affected by social norms of the community, which are of course extremely variable among societies.

The article points out that "a number of experiments such as the one by Grafman have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking." Of course this is true. Grafman and his colleagues (Moll et al., 2005) make it clear that moral reasoning is a complex process that uses both reasoning and emotional centers of the brain - there is no one specific brain structure that dictates morality, but rather a series of structures that must interact in a complex way to produce a moral decision. The role of emotion is understandable because a major purpose of emotion is social navigation; for example, laughter is a way of making a social connection with another person. Solitary-living animals have no need for emotions such as love, anger, envy, pride, etc., because feeling these or acting on these invariably involves the establishment, maintenance, or alteration of a social relationship.

While several brain structures interact to produce moral reasoning, those involved can be identified specifically because specific brain damage has predictive effects on moral behavior (Moll et al., 2005). For example, damage to the prefrontal cortex at an early age prevents normal development of moral reasoning. Such people often have short-term, self-centered responses to moral dilemmas, because they have no sense of the social consequences of their actions. A different region of the cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, is required as well because it is a center of social perception, i.e. empathy, which is also required for normal moral reasoning. The limbic system, a center of basic emotional drives, also affects morality because behavior such as aggression is controlled by this area, and can become uninhibited when parts of the limbic system become damaged. Functional MRI studies also have indicated activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (behind the eyes), the anterior temporal lobes, the insula, and the anterior cingulate cortex in people processing moral dilemmas posed to them.

The claim that these discoveries mean that "society has to rethink how it judges immoral people" (according to Adrian Raine, a USC neuroscientist) is absurd. There is a minimum standard of behavior that is acceptable in a society, and this minimum exists whether or not you are psychopathic (= brain damaged in a way that impairs interpersonal interactions due to lack of empathy). If some people are physically unable to make correct social decisions, it does not mean we must treat them as equals. Serial killers are psychopaths, and whether their brain damage is physical or developmental, they cannot be allowed to move freely in society because they have no internal constraints against killing. We lock them up so that they cannot damage society further. Most people would agree that a similar situation holds for pedophiles - there seems to be increasing evidence that most are incapable of being "rehabilitated," which is not surprising; their psychopathy is likely due to brain damage - which again can be physical or developmental - that cannot be repaired. Damaged people must be isolated from society because the structure of society must be protected for the sake of the non-damaged majority.

J. Grafman says, "Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully." Not at all. This information is simple and reasonable when understood in terms of maintaining a functional society.

An interesting moral phenomenon in humans involves the altruism of helping someone near and dear to you versus helping people in distant countries that you will never visit. The neuroscientist/philosopher Joshua Greene, interviewed in the article, gets the implications of this wrong:

"We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn't face the other kind of situation," Greene said. "It is comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you" to think about morality differently.

Yes, we evolved in a non-global world, and our knowledge of the plights of people around the world sets humans apart from other social animals. But that is not the point. What matters is that any type of altruism affects one's standing either in society, or to oneself. Our higher reasoning ability convinces us that faraway starving children are as important as the starving children next door - even as our emotions tell us otherwise - but this does not make our intuitions untrustworthy, it just adds potential complexity to the moral decisions we make. If one is a member of a church, for example, where such generous behavior is valued, it increases or maintains one's social standing to give to the needy in faraway places, it makes sense to do it. For many people, "charity begins at home" is an acceptable societal standard, and thus there is no burden to think about morality differently. Undamaged brains can still rely on their moral intuitions, and navigate their social world successfully.

Of course the different details of morality across cultures require us to be flexible in their moral reasoning. The social brain must adapt to local social conditions to successfully reproduce. This creates difficulties in a globalized world in which we not only are aware of the different moral values in different societies, but people from those different societies interact daily, not only in person, but probably more important these days, over the internet. To use an extreme example, people from societies that support individual rights for women have worked hard to stop what to us are sickening cultural practices such as female genital mutilation. Any Western woman is horrified by the practice with good reason - it not only is such an extreme example of oppression of women by men, which goes against our stated values (values that were hard won and still being fought for even in our "enlightened" society), but the long term health consequences are often dire. Yet efforts to eliminate the practice are often derailed by the women of those cultures themselves, because if they do not accept the ritual mutilation, they will be rejected by their society (and will not reproduce successfully there). It is nearly impossible to end such traditions by force. The values rejecting them must be inculcated in enough of the local population to the point where it becomes socially acceptable not to undergo the mutilation.

A similar example closer to home is the explanation of why most battered wives return to their husbands over and over again, contrary, it seems, to all reason. But in the cultures (and subcultures) in which wife-beating is common, breaking the cycle is so difficult because if a woman leaves her husband she often must give up her entire social group as well (and she often cannot fathom that it would be possible to become part of another social group, simple as that may seem in the abstract). Going it alone under such circumstances is contrary to our very nature as social beings.

It is completely natural for everyone to believe that their society's cultural norms are superior to everyone else's, because they know from experience that following those cultural norms make them successful. Of course though, if the same behavior is transferred to a society with different cultural norms, the result can be disaster. It is this naive sense of superiority (also held by most religious groups) that creates solutionless predicaments such as the current one in Iraq.

References

Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souzat, R. & Grafman, J. (2006) Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 15623-15628.

Moll, J., Zahn, R., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J. (2005) The neural basis of human moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 799-809.

Labels: behavior, brain, empathy, humans, morality, sociality

There may be a reason why placental mammals, such as ourselves, were greatly more successful evolutionarily than marsupials (which, other than opossums, are restricted to Australia). Researchers have looked for possible constraints related to the marsupial reproductive system, which is the major difference between the two groups. Marsupials have very brief gestational periods, after which the young, still at the embryonic stage, are born from the uterus and climb along the outside of the mother's body to to a teat, which expands in the embryo's mouth to provide a strong point of attachment. Most, though not all, marsupials have pouches which protect the young at this vulnerable stage. The entire fetal stage of development occurs outside the mother's body.

In a lightning search, I found one interesting paper (Sears, K.E. (2004) Constraints on the morphological evolution of marsupial shoulder girdles. Evolution, 58, 2353-2370) which finds statistical evidence that there are constraints on the scapula (shoulder blade bone) due to the embryo's need to climb to the teat at such an early stage. This has apparently limited diversification in the structure of this bone, which in turn imposes constraints on locomotion. (The scapula is an extremely important site for muscle attachment; in humans, 13 muscles attach there). Simply stated, there may be a lot fewer marsupials than placentals out there because there are fewer ways to get around, and thus fewer niches available for them to expand into.

So, it was probably more likely that large-brained types like us would be placentals. But maybe it wouldn't be impossible. So I like to imagine sometimes the convenience that being marsupial would provide to the reproductive half of our species. For instance, in placentals like us, body resources are preferentially diverted to a developing fetus; we cannot control the process. If resources are scarce for a marsupial mother who is unable or unwilling to provide for her young, she does not have to. All she has to do is remove the embryo from the teat. (Marsupials are known to do this for various reasons, including sexual selection of the young.)

If humans were marsupials, there would be no abortion debate. This is because the abortion debate is not about life, it is about control. Because a placental woman cannot remove a developing fetus easily by herself, this action can be controlled by other people. There would be no possible way to prevent the removal of a dime-sized embryo from someone's body.

There are a lot of people out there who I am sure are outraged by my characterization of the abortion debate. But it is obvious to many of us that the political debate is not about the sanctity of life, or the definition of life, or the point at which life begins, or anything to do with life. All of these discussions are obfuscations. If it were about any of these, there would not be the large overlap there is between anti-abortionists and those who are pro-capital punishment, those who support a war that has spurred the killing and maiming of generally hundreds of innocent civilians (including a hefty number of children) per week, and those who are anti-birth control. Anti-abortionism is also a fairly recent phenomenon in Christian history. Therefore it is actually a political movement, not a foundational religious moral issue. But others have pointed out these inconsistencies before.

The interesting analysis is in what human behavior we attempt to regulate. Certainly there is a largely "golden rule" theory behind many of our laws. (Despite Christian Right assertions that our laws are based on the Biblical Ten Commandments, the evidence belies this because only two transgressions listed, murder and theft, are against the law and both are necessary for a stable, functioning society. The others are not.)

But there are also repeated attempts, some successful, others not, to legislate morality at a level that is not necessary for a stable society. Abortion is clearly one of these. Other examples I can think of are Prohibition, anti-sodomy laws, and anti-drug laws (which arbitrarily leave out a slew of drugs, including nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and those deemed to have a medical purpose). Of these, only the last are still extant, and it would be a stretch to argue that they are in any way effective. But, it is at least possible, as it was during Prohibition, to nab someone with the goods and therefore punish a few token perpetrators. Sodomy laws were also largely unenforceable, aside from a few tokens, and have mostly been abolished. One can be caught in the act of sodomy, but it is harder than catching someone with drugs.

Why don't all these political Christian anti-abortionists demand other laws that could be deemed equally moral? For example, why does no one propose to make adultery illegal (as it is in many religiously based societies)? My guess is that lawmakers, because they are in positions of power, engage in it often and don't want their fun dampened. But another reason is that such a law would be about as easy to enforce as an anti-sodomy law. And what about greed, one of the seven deadly sins, specifically prohibited by the Ten Commandments? That would be inconvenient too, since it keeps our economy churning along. And of course one cannot attempt to regulate thought in a "free society."

But abortion is a winner. First, because it affects only women (and a few rogue doctors), which most of our lawmakers are not. Second, because pregnancy is the scarlet letter for many communities. It is God punishing the woman for fornication. It just so happens there is no scarlet letter for men (aside from a few diseases, and you couldn't legislate against the curing of a disease, could you?) so even those who believe men should be equally punished for such activity have no way of proving it. There's no point, so the men are safe.

For placental humans, anti-abortion laws are much easier to enforce than many morality laws, because either you go have it done by a doctor in a sterile facility, or you take your life in your hands. Certainly some people have opted for the latter approach when abortion has been illegal, but anti-abortion law remains relatively enforceable.

But if we were marsupials, there would be no scarlet letter for women, either. The disposing of an embryo would be so quick and easy it would be nearly impossible to catch someone in the act. So, we wouldn't bother. There would either be no attempt at anti-abortion law, because it would be acknowledged to be unenforceable, or, a law would pass without fanfare and hang out on the books forever, but be meaningless and unenforceable (somewhat like recent remnants of anti-sodomy laws). So no debate. But as we are, that power could be wielded easily, and so attempts to wield it will never end.

Labels: gender, health, humans, morality, religion

Frans de Waal is my new hero. He has performed a body of research on various non-human primates which has demonstrated that at least a minimal level, morality is a byproduct of sociality, rather than a unique human construct. His experiments are well designed, and essentially make it clear that the "golden rule" morality of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is an important system that helps hold many primate groups together.

As he writes in an essay from the New Scientist ("The animal roots of human morality," October 14, 2006, pp. 60-61):

In The Descent of Man [Darwin] wrote: "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts... would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

It is not hard to recognise the two pillars of human morality in the behaviour of other animals. These pillars are elegantly summed up in the golden rule that transcends the world's cultures and religions: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This unites empathy (attention to another's feelings) with reciprocity (if others follow the same rule, you too will be treated well). Human morality as we know it is unthinkable without empathy and reciprocity.

It has always been strange and interesting to me (as de Waal makes it clear it is interesting to him as well) that this basic rule does not seem to be recognized by a lot of people as the cornerstone to human morality. I believe it is embraced by secular humanists, but in many cultures, religion has interfered with and been confused with human morality, when in fact morality predates religion and in fact has nothing to do with religion. Religious morality is actually a set of rules to distinguish the practitioners of certain religions from the rest of the world, the "outsiders:"

Our evolutionary background makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We've been designed to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn't look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.

Also:
Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire able to rid us of the curse of xenophobia. It is fragile, though. In our close relatives it is switched on by events within their community, such as a youngster in distress, but it is just as easily switched off with regards to outsiders...
(de Waal, "The empathic ape," New Scientist October 8, 2005 p. 52)

This relates to a previous post of mine on the tendency for humans to "switch off" their empathy when communicating over the internet, either to a specific individual through email, or via the blogging culture of mass demonization of a defined group or individuals supposedly representing that group.

It also turns out that the effort to conform in order to fit into society is not limited to humans, either. In a Nature article (Andrew Whiten, Victoria Horner & Frans B. M. de Waal, 2005. Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees.
Nature 437:737-740), de Waal and colleagues found that when two chimpanzees, from two different social groups, were each taught a different way of working the same machine to receive food, chimps not only learned the method taught the chimp from their group, but preferred it even when they figured out the other way too. From the abstract:

... A subset of chimpanzees that discovered the alternative method nevertheless went on to match the predominant approach of their companions, showing a conformity bias that is regarded as a hallmark of human culture.

The conclusion of that article states their experimental results plainly:

...[W]e found evidence of a conformist bias, identified in numerous human studies as a powerful tendency to discount personal experience in favour of adopting perceived community norms...

These results suggest an ancient origin for the conformist cultural propensities so evident in humans.

Here's one more interesting paper, which found that primates participating in games designed to see if animals will always act in their self-interest, often did not. This is a well known idea about humans in economic circles. For example, there is a game in which two people have to agree to accept a certain amount of money. If one person does not agree, neither gets the money, but if they both agree, they both do. If two people are given the same amount of money, each happily takes the reward. But although it is always to a person's benefit to accept any amount of money, most people will reject the money if they find out that the other person would get significantly more than they do. This result probably is not too surprising to most of us.

It is interesting, though, that de Waal and his colleagues have found a quite similar behavior in primates (Sarah F. Brosnana,and Frans B. M. de Waal, 2005. Across-species perspective on the selfishness axiom. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES 28:818):

We know that some nonhuman primates react to being relatively underbenefitted compared to a conspecific, which is irrational according to a strict self-interest paradigm.

I find myself disagreeing with the statement that this behavior is irrational, however. In the context of sociality, it is not, necessarily. The basis of sociality is reciprocity, and therefore it makes sense that even animals behave as if there has been an injustice in this case. I think a functional society needs to demonstrate that there is a minimum of justice. Those human societies in which this minimum is not met are not productive, or functional, in my opinion.


And based on experiments to look at the idea of sharing, another social behavior, in primates, these same authors state:

...there was virtually no sharing between the privileged individual and their less well-endowed partner...It is interesting, therefore, that the relatively benefited individuals did not exert more effort to equalize rewards.

Interesting, perhaps... but certainly consistent with human behavior as well.


Based on this extensive research on non-human primates, the origins of both conformity and morality are clearly pre-human. Each is a double-edged sword - the dangers of groupthink (especially within a "social group" of leadership) should be clear to everyone, and the "golden rule" can create problems when people across cultures (an everyday occurrence in today's world) are attempting to interact - treating someone the way you would want to be treated results in people taking offense all the time.

Humans love to believe we transcend biology, because we are not mere "animals." Based on de Waal's work, however, it seems we may be doomed to be limited by the structure of brains adapted to functioning within small societies. Globalization has been far too rapid to even imagine that any evolution to cope with its intricacies has occurred.

Labels: brain, empathy, evolution, morality, sociality