Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts

Thursday, September 20, 2012

The sociopath's 'due north'

It is often said that sociopaths have no moral compass. But what if there is no such thing as a moral compass? What if instead, there are multiple ‘due norths’?

That seems to be the unspoken implication of an article i read recently about morality. The article features Jonathan Haidt’s ‘Moral Foundations’ theory, which purports to explain why morality varies among different cultures on the one hand while still showing some striking similarities on the other hand. The theory suggests that there are five universal foundations. Each culture in turn 'selects' a few of those foundations and builds traditions, norms and rituals upon them to construct a commonly shared morality. The five foundations in brief are:

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturing.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
Using the American political spectrum as a kind of case study, Haidt suggests that liberals tend to value harm/care and fairness above all else, while conservatives emphasize ingroup loyalty, authority and purity. He takes pains to suggest neither value grouping is objectively better than the other, merely different. I agree with him since there's no good evidence to suggest otherwise. What’s more, not only are values and moral biases at least in part, genetically heritable, the particular society a person is born into very often also plays an decisive role. What those two facts make clear is that conscious choice is not a relevant factor when it comes to generating most people’s sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ As one author puts it, since most people cannot see what comes before (genetics, history and culture), they assume what comes after (their beliefs, biases and morality) are freely chosen. It’s obvious they are not. Moreover, not only are the moral biases that many empaths swear, live and die by not freely chosen, they are not even rational. The evidence coming in from research on morality indicates that emotions, gut reactions, play a leading role in moral judgments and that rationalization of those judgments follow. The human brain is a belief factory, and part of its job is to rationally justify moral feelings.Iif people want to reach a conclusion, they usually find a way to do so that has little to do with anything resembling sound theory or evidence; in short, it has little to do with reality. This partly explains why sociopaths can see the hypocrisy and absurdity that often passes for moral debate.

Which brings us back to the subject. The sociopath is born with much less in the way of moral biases. We don’t need to justify our actions to ourselves, although we may go through the motions of justification with others because we know that’s what they expect and doing so is sometimes useful. More importantly, it’s clear to us in a way that it might not be for most empaths that when it comes to morality, there are as many ‘due norths’ as there are people. Until convincing evidence to the contrary comes in, there’s no reason to fix our so called broken moral compasses. We don’t need no stinkin' moral compass. Reality based thinking works just fine.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Moral judgment without emotions

A recent experiment about the impact of emotions in decisionmaking with some lofty aspirations:

The study's answer will inform a classic philosophical debate on whether humans make moral judgments based on norms and societal rules, or based on their emotions.

The test basically required people to perform different versions of the trolley problem, asking them to hurt/kill one person in order to save multiple people. Most people have trouble pulling the trigger. The people with damage to a part of the frontal lobe that makes them less emotional "make a less personal calculation." "The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many." Most people are torn between the two choices, but the emotionless people "seem to lack that conflict." Instead, they behave perfectly rationally:


"What is absolutely astonishing about our results is how selective the deficit is," he said. "Damage to the frontal lobe leaves intact a suite of moral problem solving abilities, but damages judgments in which an aversive action is put into direct conflict with a strong utilitarian outcome."

It is the feeling of aversion that normally blocks humans from harming each other. Damasio described it as "a combination of rejection of the act, but combined with the social emotion of compassion for that particular person."


Surprise! This time the sociopaths is not the bad guy.

The study holds another implication for philosophy.By showing that humans are neurologically unfit for strict utilitarian thinking, the study suggests that neuroscience may be able to test different philosophies for compatibility with human nature.

It turns out that utilitarian judgments are sometimes valuable and important and that it's the normal people who have the deficit in making them and the sociopaths who excel.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Decisionmaking

I'm obsessed with it. I have poor impulse control and no moral compass. After I got sick of making crap decisions and dealing with the fallout, I started making decision-making a personal religion.

I have talked before about how economic efficiency is a serviceable prosthetic moral compass. I have also suggested that sociopaths study aspects of decision-making, particularly game theory, to learn how to better harness their sociopathic skills for their benefit.

Of course, decision-making is only as good as the information on which it is based. Luckily sociopaths can display amazing amounts of insight into how the world works.Llike the color blindness of many predators, our inability to see the distractions of the full emotional spectrum and subtleties of social norms can actually improve our ability to stalk our prey at night, or flaws or patterns in the social construct. I have such an uncannily accurate ability to gauge probabilities, to discover patterns in everything (including human behavior), that I sometimes appear psychic. I empathize with people like Cassandra, actually, because although my predictions are frequently accurate, I mostly end up keeping them to myself -- No one even wants to believe them. Sigh.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Modeling the success of cheaters

It was hilarious to me reading some of the responses to the just world fallacy post.  A lot of people really struggled with the gross inaccuracy of the phrase "cheaters never win." I stumbled upon this Forbes article which concisely explains with mathematical modeling how it is that cheaters win:


I want to make sure I say that there is a more elemental reason why meritocracy produces a corrupt ruling class and it is this:

Cheaters may almost never win but, given equal opportunity and a large enough competition, the winners are almost always cheaters.

Why?

Well, no one cheats because they think if that even if they get away with it they will be worse off. No, they cheat because if they get away with it they will be better off. Cheaters are taking a gamble.

Even if the system is pretty good and the odds are stacked against the cheaters, if there are enough players then some of the cheaters will get away with it, nonetheless.

When they do they will gain an advantage. Now, imagine that life is a series of such competitions played over and over again. Each time some people will cheat and some will get away with it. Each time some will gain an advantage.

If the competition is immense, say it encompasses a country of 300 Million or a global population of 7 Billion, then by the Law of Large numbers some cheaters will be lucky enough to get away with it every single time. This means every single round they gain an advantage and slip ahead of the pack.

After enough rounds the front of the pack is completely dominated by cheaters.

That doesn't necessarily mean that cheating will always mean cheating will always pay off.  As the Forbes article concludes, "Lottery players almost always lose, but society’s biggest winners will almost always have made their money in the lottery."



Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Creativity = immorality

File this under "how to become more like a sociopath," this Scientific American article discusses how being creative (and even thinking more creatively) makes you more likely to cross moral boundaries:

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.
***
The authors hypothesized that it is creativity which causes unethical behavior by allowing people the means to justify their misdeeds, but it is hard to say for certain whether this is correct given the correlational nature of the study. It could just as easily be true, after all, that unethical behavior leads people to be more creative, or that there is something else which causes both creativity and dishonesty, such as intelligence. To explore this, the authors set up an experiment in which participants were induced into a creative mindset and then given the opportunity to cheat.  [It did.]
***
In addition, the researchers had guessed that creativity would lead to unethical behavior because it enabled people to more easily come up with justifications for their actions. Research has previously shown that whenever people do something which might be perceived as bad, they tend to reduce the ‘badness’ of this behavior by finding some justification for their corrupt behavior. As an example, if you find yourself being less than honest on your taxes, you may justify this by telling yourself that this is something everyone does, or that it doesn’t really hurt anyone.

The craziest part about this is the final experiment, that basically shows that one of the primary reasons why people don't cheat is that they can't come up with their own justifications for their behavior and that once you provide a readymade justification for them, they are much more likely to cheat:

So, if creativity leads to dishonesty primarily by assisting in coming up with justifications for dishonest behavior a creative mindset should not influence people’s likelihood of cheating if they already have some justification in mind. To test this idea, the researchers provided ‘justifications’ for some participants by allowing them to roll the die multiple times, but telling them that only the first roll counted. It turns out that one way of increasing the ease with which people can come up with justifications is by allowing them to observe something which almost happened, but didn’t. In this case, rolling a six on the second roll after rolling a lower number on the first, critical roll should give people a leg up on justifying their dishonest behavior.

It was found that when asked to roll the die once, people not primed with creativity were relatively honest. Individuals primed with creativity, on the other hand, behaved much more dishonestly, reporting much higher die rolls on average. Further, this effect disappeared when people rolled the die multiple times. That is, when people were provided with help to think up justifications, creativity had no effect on cheating. This pattern of results seems to confirm that creativity helps people to think up justifications for dishonest behavior.

These studies demonstrate that there is indeed a dark side to creativity. Perhaps, given this information, it should come as no surprise that the best and brightest in many fields are frequently caught in all manner of immoral transgressions.

Now empaths who want to acquire the skills of a sociopath have yet another avenue to pursue in cultivating an ability to be morally blind -- creativity.  According to the article, all sorts of activities can get you in that cheating frame of mind, even something as simple as arranging the words sky, is, why, blue, and the, into the sentence, “the sky is blue”.  This may also be why showbusiness is so cutthroat.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Shame and Justification (part 3)

Under the title "The Moral Diet," NY Times op-ed columnist David Brooks reviews Dan Ariely’s new book “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty” (Ariely is also the author of the recent Conscience+, the app).  Ariely told the story of how the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was the victim of rampant embezzlement, mainly by elderly volunteers manning an unsecured cash drawer.  Interestingly, there wasn't one person who was stealing tons, but many stealing just a little.  The conclusion: "Nearly everybody cheats, but usually only a little."  The reason being that "most of us think we are pretty wonderful. We can cheat a little and still keep that 'good person' identity. Most people won’t cheat so much that it makes it harder to feel good about themselves."  In an experiment, Ariely found that cab drivers were more likely to cheat their standard fare than someone who is blind, because of what David Brooks calls "the good person construct."

Ariely points out that we are driven by morality much more than standard economic models allow. But I was struck by what you might call the Good Person Construct and the moral calculus it implies. For the past several centuries, most Westerners would have identified themselves fundamentally as Depraved Sinners. In this construct, sin is something you fight like a recurring cancer — part of a daily battle against evil.

But these days, people are more likely to believe in their essential goodness. People who live by the Good Person Construct try to balance their virtuous self-image with their selfish desires. They try to manage the moral plusses and minuses and keep their overall record in positive territory. In this construct, moral life is more like dieting: I give myself permission to have a few cookies because I had salads for lunch and dinner. I give myself permission to cheat a little because, when I look at my overall life, I see that I’m still a good person.

The Good Person isn’t shooting for perfection any more than most dieters are following their diet 100 percent. It’s enough to be workably suboptimal, a tolerant, harmless sinner and a generally good guy.

Obviously, though, there’s a measurement problem. You can buy a weight scale to get an objective measure of your diet. But you can’t buy a scale of virtues to put on the bathroom floor. And given our awesome capacities for rationalization and self-deception, most of us are going to measure ourselves leniently: I was honest with that blind passenger because I’m a wonderful person. I cheated the sighted one because she probably has too much money anyway.

I think this is actually an insightful and accurate observation.  I have noticed this a lot recently, more in discussions I see on the blog than in real life, but probably only because the topic of morality comes up a lot more here than it does in real life and people tend to feel the need to take some kind of moral high ground when advocating something horrible like killing all sociopaths (or even just the simple art of accusing anyone of anything), so there is a lot of self-justification going on here.  The weird thing is that many people will unashamedly admit that they're not perfect, but then go on to assert something categorically negative about sociopaths.  I guess the price of admission to the moral high ground is not what it used to be.    


Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Famous sociopaths: Viktor Bout

Legendary arms dealer Viktor Bout may not be famous in the same way that A-list Hollywood actors are famous (although the Nicholas Cage film "Lord of War" is basically based on him).  If anything, Bout is most famous to Interpol or other government organizations.  It's not surprising.  I bet most sociopaths are more likely to be infamous than famous.  Here are the selections from a New Yorker profile on Bout that make me think he is a sociopath:
  • Although he had arrived in the Emirates not knowing much about Arab culture, he had a cosmopolitan ability to adapt to new circumstances. 
  • Bout, who had the brash confidence of the autodidact, didn’t have a source of weapons, but he knew that he could find one. 
  • “Viktor is a fast learner and he is very easy with the contacts,” Mirchev told me. “He could reach the right people at any time.” 
  • Schneidman, who once termed Bout “the personification of evil,” told me that Bout was “directly undermining our efforts to bring peace.” At the same time that Bout was delivering weapons to Savimbi’s forces, Schneidman said, he was also flying arms to the Angolan government. I asked Bout whether Savimbi knew about his mixed allegiance. Of course, Bout said. Didn’t Savimbi mind? “If I didn’t do it, someone else would,” Bout said. 
  • Officials in Washington began to see Bout as the quintessential figure of transnational crime. He was distinguished not by cruelty or ruthlessness but by cunning amorality. “If he wasn’t doing arms and all the vile stuff, he would be a damn good businessman,” Andreas Morgner, a sanctions expert at the Treasury Department, said. 
  • Bout told me, “My job was to bring shipments from Bulgaria to Zaire, and then to Togo. . . . I did it. I understood my limits.” He added, “How, after that, someone else wants to squeeze it? That’s not my business.” In this view, he and Mirchev were not doing anything wrong; they were simply filling gaps in the global economy.
  • “Why should I be afraid?” he said. “In my life, I did not do anything that I should be concerned about.” Bout began leaving a trail of inconsistent statements. He either refused to address difficult matters—“It’s not a question to discuss what we transported”—or lied outright. 
There are plenty of other small indications.  It's a pretty interesting article, particularly reading people's reactions about how Bout would both ship in weapons to revolutionaries and peacekeepers, for instance:
  • Soon after the raid, [U.S.] Department of Defense officials entered the names of the companies under sanctions into their databases. They made a surprising discovery: some of Bout’s companies were now delivering tents and frozen food to troops in Iraq. His planes had flown dozens of times in and out of Baghdad, according to flight records, and Bout was profiting from it. The Pentagon eventually voided the relevant contracts, but, by then, the war in Iraq had helped Viktor Bout get back on his feet.
I guess not everyone fits into nice, neat bad/good boxes.  

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Conscience, the App

Psychologist and behavioral economist Dan Ariely has a new app called Conscience+.  I knew that outsourcing our moral and willpower decisions was going to happen soon, I just didn't know it would happen this soon.  Here's what he writes about it:


I’m pleased to announce that I have a new app available at the App Store called Conscience+.

Conscience+ helps you reason through moral dilemmas by providing you with little “shoulder angels” that can help you argue either side of a decision. Simply flip the switch at the top of the app to move between good conscience and bad conscience. Whether you need the extra push to go through with a selfish deed or words of wisdom to resist a bad temptation, Conscience+ has you covered.

Get help with:
turning away the dessert menu
splurging on a new electronic gadget
staying faithful to your romantic partner
padding your expense report on your boss’s dime
lying on your college application
and much, much more!
Get Conscience+ free from the App Store here! Once you’ve played with the app yourself, let us know in the comments if you have any suggested excuses. If we like them, we’ll put them in the next update.

I guess like most apps, this app will get smarter and smarter the more people use it?  And pretty soon we'll be completely outsourcing our moral decisionmaking, the same way that no one really programs their own computers or drives a manual transmission anymore?

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Different moral universes

A psychologist argues that American conservatives and liberals come from different moral universes:
Jonathan Haidt is hardly a road-rage kind of guy, but he does get irritated by self-righteous bumper stickers. The soft-spoken psychologist is acutely annoyed by certain smug slogans that adorn the cars of fellow liberals: "Support our troops: Bring them home" and "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

"No conservative reads those bumper stickers and thinks, 'Hmm — so liberals are patriotic!'" he says, in a sarcastic tone of voice that jarringly contrasts with his usual subdued sincerity. "We liberals are universalists and humanists; it's not part of our morality to highly value nations. So to claim dissent is patriotic — or that we're supporting the troops, when in fact we're opposing the war — is disingenuous.

"It just pisses people off."

The University of Virginia scholar views such slogans as clumsy attempts to insist we all share the same values. In his view, these catch phrases are not only insincere — they're also fundamentally wrong. Liberals and conservatives, he insists, inhabit different moral universes. There is some overlap in belief systems, but huge differences in emphasis.
. . .
As part of . . . early research, Haidt and a colleague, Brazilian psychologist Silvia Koller, posed a series of provocative questions to people in both Brazil and the U.S. One of the most revealing was: How would you react if a family ate the body of its pet dog, which had been accidentally run over that morning?

"There were differences between nations, but the biggest differences were across social classes within each nation," Haidt recalls. "Students at a private school in Philadelphia thought it was just as gross, but it wasn't harming anyone; their attitude was rationalist and harm-based. But when you moved down in social class or into Brazil, morality is based not on just harm. It's also about loyalty and family and authority and respect and purity. That was an important early finding."
. . .
Haidt went to work for Richard Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago who arranged for his postdoc fellow to spend three months in India. Haidt refers to his time in Bhubaneshwar — an ancient city full of Hindu temples that retains a traditional form of morality with rigid cast and gender roles — as transformative.

"I found there is not really a way to say 'thank you' or 'you're welcome' (in the local language)," he recalls. "There are ways of acknowledging appreciation, but saying 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' didn't make any emotional sense to them. Your stomach doesn't say 'thank you' to your esophagus for passing the food to it! What I finally came to understand was to stop acting as if everybody was equal. Rather, each person had a job to do, and that made the social system run smoothly."

Gradually getting past his reflexive Western attitudes, he realized that "the Confucian/Hindu traditional value structure is very good for maintaining order and continuity and stability, which is very important in the absence of good central governance. But if the goal is creativity, scientific insight and artistic achievement, these traditional societies pretty well squelch it. Modern liberalism, with its support for self-expression, is much more effective. I really saw the yin-yang."
. . .
[A] range of ethical systems have always coexisted and most likely always will.
. . .
Haidt . . . concluded that any full view of the origins of human morality would have to take into account not only culture (as analyzed by anthropologists) but also evolution. He reasoned it was highly unlikely humans would care so much about morality unless moral instincts and emotions had become a part of human nature. He began to suspect that morality evolved not just to help individuals as they competed and cooperated with other individuals, but also to help groups as they competed and cooperated with other groups.

"Morality is not just about how we treat each other, as most liberals think," he argues. "It is also about binding groups together and supporting essential institutions."
. . .
"I think this is terribly important," he says. "People are not going to converge on their judgments of what's good or bad, or right and wrong. Diversity is inherent in our species. And in a globalized world, we're going to be bumping into each other a lot."
So are sociopaths weird because we have no moral compass while everyone else has some kind of different moral compasses? Or are we just weird because we do have a sense of "morality," but we would just never think to call it that, associate it with random emotions, and/or try to enforce it on everyone else...

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

A prosthetic moral compass?

Like many sociopaths, I have my own way of organizing the world and coming up with shortcuts for good decisions. I like to use economics and the principles of efficiency. Most of the time my method tracks what the majority think is the moral thing to do. Why don't we kill? Because if it were really more efficient to take another person's life, the murderer should be able to pay enough money to the victim that he would consent to the murder. Along the same reasoning, murder of animals is fine because animals don't have the access to capital markets or earning potential to be able to buy their life, right? Wrong. Because otherwise that would also apply to slaves. See? It's complicated. Hard to keep track of things. But it's only a prosthetic moral compass, so what do you expect?

Here's an oft-asked question: If there were a cure for sociopathy, would I take it? Or do I really believe that sociopathy is just another way of navigating the world, an acceptable variance in human behavior? Would it be a betrayal to "my people" to accept a "solution" to a "problem" that they don't think needs solving? A significant portion of the deaf community feels that cochlear implants are an affront to legitimate deaf culture. What if there there were a cochlear implant for the heart? Wikianswers seems to think there's one coming:
In cases where brain damage is too severe to permit [normal therapy], new developments in technology in the next decades will bring implantable devices that may be able to be used in the brain, along with other means including synthetic replacement neurotransmitters, to carry nerve impulses along paths formerly silent and unused in the sociopath's brain.
I'm not one to get my information from wikianswers, and I haven't been able to find out what new technology this person was referring to, but it still is an interesting idea. Particularly if it stopped being evolutionarily advantageous to be a sociopath, I think I would seriously consider getting a mechanical device to "fix" my "broken" brain.

At the very least, I think it would be interesting to experience what others experience, even for a limited duration or in a limited capacity.  I was just reading in the NY Times about how John Elder Robison (Aspie and author of the memoir "Look Me in the Eye") underwent some experimental treatment that "had given him a temporary insight into other people he had not had previously".  If something like that were possible for people like me, I would almost certainly choose to do it.  I feel like that sort of insight can only be a good thing.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Emotional moral judgment

This was an interesting (although sometimes confusing) overview sent to me by a reader of some of the recent work that researcher Jean Decety has been doing on moral judgment (Decety is teaming up soon with our favorite brain scan-ologist Kent Kiehl for more brain scans of male psychopathic prisoners).

The most interesting assertion in the article was: "Negative emotions alert people to the moral nature of a situation by bringing on discomfort that can precede moral judgment, and such an emotional response is stronger in young children, he explained." Apparently children's moral judgment is not just preceded by a negative emotional response, but is essentially a negative emotional response: "For young children, the amygdala, which is associated with the generation of emotional responses to a social situation, was much more activated than it was in adults."

The emotional moral judgment of the child evolves as an adult to be tempered by the "dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex — areas of the brain that allow people to reflect on the values linked to outcomes and actions." So while children are assuming that every bad act is malicious, adults are able to recognize and discount accidents and find nuance in levels of maliciousness.

I hadn't realized that moral judgment starts out as an emotional reaction in both adults and children (and remains an emotional reaction in children). It makes sense that sociopaths would have a comparatively blunted sense of morality, assuming that they either do not feel this emotional impetus or feel it less, which is certainly the case with me -- I have never felt moral outrage. My friends joke that I wouldn't be able to smell a lynch mob coming.

I have mixed feelings about the emotional component of moral judgment. On the one hand, I understand how nature reinforces important functions with emotion. On the other hand, emotional moral judgment also enables people to do really horrible things to each other for little to no provocation.

Do any empaths want to defend their way of doing things, i.e. argue that emotional moral reason is better than unemotional moral reasoning?

Friday, May 7, 2010

The moral life of babies

This was an interesting article in the NY Times about the innate moral reasoning that babies seem to have, or more accurately, *not* have. Excerpts:
From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

[Still, s]ocialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

Morality, after all, is a different sort of affair than physics or psychology. The truths of physics and psychology are universal: objects obey the same physical laws everywhere; and people everywhere have minds, goals, desires and beliefs. But the existence of a universal moral code is a highly controversial claim; there is considerable evidence for wide variation from society to society.

In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.

At the same time, though, people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense. Since natural selection works, at least in part, at a genetic level, there is a logic to being instinctively kind to our kin, whose survival and well-being promote the spread of our genes. More than that, it is often beneficial for humans to work together with other humans, which means that it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the innateness of at least basic moral concepts.
The article explains how babies prefer good actors over those they perceive to be bad actors. Even more interesting to me was that although babies generally equate bad behavior with being a bad actor, if bad behavior is done to a someone or something that the baby thinks is a bad actor, the baby thinks the behavior is justified, presumably as a just punishment.
All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events (remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires. But this shouldn’t strike you as an altogether alien experience: while we adults possess the additional critical capacity of being able to consciously reason about morality, we’re not otherwise that different from babies — our moral feelings are often instinctive. In fact, one discovery of contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation.
***
The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go. The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of his book “The Selfish Gene,” “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.” Or as a character in the Kingsley Amis novel “One Fat Englishman” puts it, “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.”

Monday, May 3, 2010

Sympathy vs. empathy (part 1)

A reader writes:
I ran across your blog and just wanted to say I really like and agree with what you've written. I'm a sociopath myself, so maybe I'm just happy (yes, we do feel some emotions, don't we lol) to run into someone that understands what it's like. You present the information on what it's like to be a sociopath is a very honest and straightforward way, and I respect that. I, too, have come out to people who I've suspected are sociopaths themselves, but generally if I don't want someone to know, they don't. There's a certain kindred feeling I get in recognizing someone who is like me. Sometimes I admit as much to people as I believe I can get away with, such as admitting to being manipulative or deceitful to get what I want. Like everything, there's an agenda to that: it shows the person I consider them close enough to be able to open up to them and reveal intimate details about myself, and it also gives me attention. And if this person is someone I want something from, well you get the idea.

But I wonder, do you think we are "bad" people? I hate using that word because it seems so black and white. But there are times I almost think I do feel genuine sympathy or sadness, or what I imagine it would feel like, but then again this could be me fooling myself into trying to believe I am normal. Oftentimes, I find myself imitating the behavior I see on TV shows or soap operas, and it's like playing a role of sorts. My grandpa is dying of cancer and will be dead in a few months' time and I stand to inherit his home when he passes. The idea of owning a home is of course a plus for me, and I admit when the doctors expressed a slight chance he may live, I was even disappointed because it meant I wouldn't get my house after all. But things have gone downhill and although I do my best to show sympathy, I know I want that house. I'd never kill him myself, but you get the picture. But just thinking that I can behave this way gets me depressed and I can say I can genuinely make myself cry for real, but not in any way that expresses sympathy for my grandfather...more like a self-involved "why do I have to be this way" thing. I realize I am not normal and my emotions are not normal, but that doesn't mean I believe them to be wrong. I often find myself accusing others of having false emotions, but then I realize that's most likely because they seem so foreign to me that I think everyone must be faking it like myself. It shocks me to find out people actually DO care about others and it's genuine.

If I do feel sadness or empathy, it stems from the fact that I realize I am not normal and I can make myself cry about this. Like "What's wrong with me? What am I lacking? Why can't I be normal?" But I can never seem to cry over anything regarding -another- person. If I hurt someone and I cry about it, it's not because of any remorse, it's more like "Jeez I'm so screwed up"...notice the "I'm" there. It makes it selfish, if you know what I mean.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Sociopath code

A frequent question I get is how can sociopaths be good? Why would sociopaths choose to "do the right thing" if they don't feel the emotion "guilt" like everyone else does?

We all use short cuts to make decisions. It would be impossible for us to make a fully informed, reasoned decision every time such a decision was necessary. Empaths use emotional shortcuts, sociopaths don't/can't, so we come up with some other shortcut. A lot of sociopaths use shortcuts like "anything goes," or "I am only in it for me," but I have also met/talked to many sociopaths who have a more "principled" approach to life. I have met sociopaths who are utilitarian, a la Jeremy Bentham, or even Rawlsian. Some of my readers use religious codes to guide their actions. I use the shortcut of economic efficiency, gap-filled by Judeo-Christian ethics, which for me acts like a mental/emotional exercise regime -- monotonous drudgery, but ultimately good for mental/emotional health. The one thing that sociopath "codes" tend to have in common is that they don't fully map with prevailing social norms.

To my eyes, normal people lack a certain consistency in their sense of right and wrong. I think the American political parties are a good example of this. Why is the christian right against helping poor people? How can big government square with a desire to maximize individual freedoms? I have often wondered why people choose to be "conservative" or "liberal" rather than libertarian or socialist. My mind can't reconcile the seeming inconsistencies like other people's minds do, apparently.

One sort of bad thing about the sociopath's "code" compared to the empaths' is that the empath really drinks the Kool-Aid and believes that their way of life is "right," and has intrinsic meaning and purpose. Sociopaths get no such benefit from our codes, which is why our coping methods for dealing with the world, with all its uncertainties and pointlessness, are not always adequate to keep the darkness out of our minds and hearts.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Cultural morality in action

A friend sent me a link to this Huffington Post article suggesting that the practice of frying a fish and eating it while still alive may be "shocking" and "too graphic for some readers." I guess the Chinese are just a cruel race of sociopaths, because the people in the video seemed to enjoy it immensely.


Thursday, October 1, 2009

Trolley problem

This was sent in by an anonymous reader. I remember reading the trolley problem before and being really surprised that some people might not kill the one guy to save the more. For some reason, I also feel that killing the wandering stranger is a mistake. Maybe it is because I know the statistics of organ transplant success. Or I know how expensive and dangerous it is to do those type of surgeries. In some sort of way, I think I feel like the young stranger is actually more deserving of his own organs than the other five. Or it could be my particular form of efficiency-loving Burkean libertarianism that generally doesn't like to mess with things because of unforeseen consequences -- the longer the period you're looking at (organ donations), the greater the uncertainty. Or maybe I do have a soul. Here it is:

Thought experiments can teach us about the cognitive processes involved in moral decision making, and perhaps none is ultimately so telling as the trolley problem. One formulation of the trolley problem goes like this:
Five people are tied to a trolley track, and a trolley is speeding toward them. You're standing next to a switch that can divert the trolley onto another track. If you do nothing they'll all be killed in a matter of seconds. If you throw the switch it will divert the trolley off of the track with the five people tied to it, and onto a track with only one person tied to it. While the five will be saved, the one who wouldn't have been harmed otherwise will now be killed. Do you throw the switch?
Another formulation can be stated this way:
Five people are tied to a trolley track, and the trolley is speeding toward them. If you do nothing, they'll all be killed in a matter of seconds. You're standing on a bridge behind a tall and extremely fat man who is leaning against a rickety railing. No one else is there, and he's totally oblivious to both your presence and his precarious position. If you push him, the railing will give and he'll fall directly in front of the trolley. He will be killed, but he'll also bring the trolley to a stop, preventing it from harming the five people tied to the track. Do you push the fat man?
For hard-headed readers who answered "yes" to the first two, there is at least one more formulation:
You are a talented surgeon in a small village where five people need various organ transplants. None of them are on waiting lists, and all will die in a matter of days if they don't get organs. Each is in a weakened state, so you can't use organs from one to save another. If you could find a healthy donor, you'd be able to save them all.

By chance, a young traveler with a minor cut on his arm visits your office. Just for kicks you run a blood test, and find out that he's a perfect match for all 5. He mentions that no one saw him come in. Furthermore, not only is he in the country illegally, traveling alone on foot, and paying for everything with cash, but he didn't even tell anyone back home where he was going because he's estranged from his family. etc., etc. Do you tell the young man to wait while you get a tetanus booster shot, only to return with a syringe containing a powerful sedative? Or do you just smile and send him on his way?

When answering the various formulations of the problem, what decisions did you make, and why did you make them? How long did it take you to arrive at your decisions? How long did it take you to come up with explanations for your decisions?

Joshua Greene of Harvard University has done extensive research on cognition and moral judgment by asking test subjects these kinds of questions while performing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). His results can be summarized in three sentences. When people choose a course of action which maximizes outcomes, the parts of their brain which show the most activity are those associated with rational and quantitative thinking. When people choose a course of action in which they do not perform acts which directly harm others, the parts of their brain which show the most activity are those associated with emotion and feeling. These parts of the brain 'light up' as soon as the questions are read, much more quickly than most people can formulate an explanation.
When I tried to answer the series of trolley questions myself, I found that I was making nearly instantaneous judgments as to which option made me feel least guilty. The process of using my intellect to come up with a list of justifications didn't even start until after my decision was final. The most troubling thing about this for me is that I approached the series of questions with deliberate intent to be as rational and consistent as possible. I realized that I couldn't be. In all likelihood, virtually no one can.

This raises important questions for readers who pride themselves on rationality. We could address hypothetical questions about judgments on specific situations, but I'm more interested in general questions like: "How can I trust my moral judgment on anything?" Well, how can you? The fundamental point of the trolley problem goes beyond whether any one decision is right or wrong. The real question is whether it's even possible for certain categories of human decision making to be rational. I don't think we can have a grown-up discussion about morality without addressing this.

At its core, the trolley problem raises a new kind of "duality" question; one which is thoroughly modern and scientific. Are we thinking with one brain, or multiple brains? Does the amygdala vie for control with the cerebral cortex? Do the right and left hemispheres struggle against each other? If so, what determines which will win? If we direct our own thoughts and decisions, then why are those decisions made as quickly as autonomic reflexes? Who or what is in control of our thoughts? What does our thought process say about who and what we are?

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Animals have a sense of morality?

According to one scientist at least:
Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.

Until recently, humans were thought to be the only species to experience complex emotions and have a sense of morality.

But Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are "hard-wired" into the brains of all mammals and provide the "social glue" that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups.

He has compiled evidence from around the world that shows how different species of animals appear to have an innate sense of fairness, display empathy and help other animals that are in distress.
I don't get what is so special about moral compasses if they are all relative to the particular culture one is raised in and do not necessarily include those perceived as outsiders:
"Just as in humans, the moral nuances of a particular culture or group will be different from another, but they are certainly there. Moral codes are species specific, so they can be difficult to compare with each other or with humans."
Looks like we sociopaths are more alone than we thought. But at least no one will ever be able to call us filthy animals anymore.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Conversation with a brother

Brother: I'm starting to realize that I have a talent for getting inside peoples' heads and figuring out what is going on in there. It kind of scares people

M.E.
: Yeah, some people are private, or get creeped out by their transparency.

Brother
: Yeah. I kind of like that. I think that you and I don't have a set default so we can associate with and understand almost everyone's motives.

M.E
.: Yeah, true, we don't have a set default. It's kind of a super power.

Brother
: Yeah. We are like super heroes. You and i have the same powers but use them decidedly differently.

M.E.
: How so?

Brother
: You use them to punish and hurt. Right now, I'm using mine to save a girl's life. So to speak.

M.E.
: Sometimes people need punishment to keep them straight. Save a girl's life?

Brother
: It's a complicated story involving someone dying of cancer, and the girl in question not feeling that she will be able to live life any more after that person is gone. She came to me because I knew what was going on in her head and she wanted some advice. I don't say it to brag. I'm not proud, it's only the truth.


M.E.
: Yeah, I understand. So what happened?

Brother
: Nothing yet. I have to write back to her. How is that for a difference between you and me? You aren't a bad influence. ou helped me realize an ability I never knew I had and I'm using it to help people. Of course if you look at it the other way, I could crush her and probably make her kill herself.

M.E
.: Ha, that's a good way of phrasing it

Brother
: No good

M.E.
: Yeah, you could crush her, but won’t. Most of the time I make the "right" choice too :)

Brother
: Good. Me too. But sometimes it is fun to be bad ;)

M.E.
: Seriously, right? I try to do it in moderation. And only when it isn't too horrible. There are certain wickednesses in my life that are so deliciously dehumanizing that i still lick my lips just thinking about them.

Brother
: I think I should do my work now.

M.E.
: Yeah, work is good. Idle hands are the devil's tools.
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