EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (4 page)

Humans go to restaurants and bees to flowers because both are associated with food. Within these broad categories, there are good restaurants and flowers, as well as bad ones, where good and bad are determined by experience. The experience can be direct, as when food is actually consumed, or indirect, as when humans listen to an animated friend describe a restaurant’s menu and bees watch a hive mate dance a description of the flower’s location and quality. Once the association between food and location is established, simply seeing the restaurant or flower triggers a cascade of neural and chemical activity in the brain linked to reward, including its anticipation. The restaurant and flower are cues that predict food. If you walked into your favorite restaurant and found that they sold fertilizer rather than food, you would be heartbroken. If you haven’t been to the restaurant in a long time, but memorialized your previous experience as a gastronomic high point, you will be deeply disappointed if your first bite doesn’t live up to the standards you anticipated. This mismatch between anticipated and experienced reward leads to a cascade of brain activity — indicative of an error. The primary engine driving the experience of reward, including predicting the timing and intensity of its occurrence, is the dopaminergic system, a network of brain areas that releases dopamine in virtually all animals, including humans
¹³
.

There are several genes that control the expression of dopamine, a point I alluded to earlier when describing the work of Peciña and Berridge on mice. For each gene, there are variants that cause individual differences in how much dopamine is expressed. Those variants leading to higher concentrations of dopamine are associated with greater risk-taking, as well as higher levels of compulsive gambling, eating, and substance abuse. This suggests that changes in the level of dopamine are associated with both changes in the anticipation of reward, and a diminished capacity for self-control. When we anticipate a highly rewarding experience and lack self-control, excessive consumption is a likely outcome. To determine whether the link between dopamine, reward anticipation, self-control, and excess is correct, we turn to experimental evidence.

To measure anticipated rewards, the cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot asked individuals to rate how happy they would be if they vacationed in eighty possible destinations. Although you may think that a Caribbean island retreat is ideal, whereas someone else imagines the cafes and museums of Paris, the interesting patterns arise when comparing each individual’s choices — their ranking of the Caribbean relative to Paris and several other locations. Following this first round of ranking, some subjects took a placebo while others took L-dopa, a drug that selectively increases the release of dopamine. Later, these same subjects imagined what it would be like to actually vacation in these eighty destinations, and rated their imagined experience. Consistently, those on L-dopa felt they would be much happier. This suggests that dopamine isn’t just associated with changes in our anticipation of and desire for a reward. Dopamine drives our experience of an anticipated reward, whether vacation, food, or drugs. This regulation of anticipated rewards is an adaptive process, as it enables us to set up expectations and determine when they are violated.

Changes in dopamine can also cause an uncalibrated experience of anticipated reward, an out-of-control desire for more. This occurs because surges in dopamine also impact the brain circuitry involved in self-control. When dopamine levels surge, either naturally or due to experimental intervention, the capacity for self-control loses its grip, leading to the kinds of excess seen in addictions to food, drugs, and gambling. This is a maladaptive process. Regulation of dopamine thus determines, in part, whether our desires are calibrated or uncalibrated, and thus healthy or unhealthy. Clinical populations help us understand this process.

Parkinson’s patients suffer from brain dysfunction in areas that regulate the level of dopamine. In general, they have lower levels of dopamine and as a result show deficits in learning. These deficits are in large part due to their failure to connect actions with anticipated reward. Medically boosting dopamine in Parkinson’s patients can improve learning, and as in Tarot’s studies noted above, this occurs because they are more sensitive to the relationship between actions and rewards. But, in a significant number of Parkinson’s patients, boosting dopamine with L-dopa results in pathological gambling, a classic problem of self-control. Those patients who are most vulnerable are those with a particular variant of a gene known as DRD4 that results in elevated levels of dopamine. In healthy populations, those with this same gene variant are also more likely to exhibit pathological gambling, as well as attention disorder deficit — a global clinical problem involving poor self-control that afflicts approximately 1 out of 20 children. These studies show that addictive behaviors are commonly associated with abnormally high levels of dopamine. Addictive behaviors reveal the relationship between poor self-control and excess.

Consider obesity, a global and rapidly increasing health problem today. To appreciate the numbers, let’s focus on the United States, the country with the highest proportion of obese people in the world. Based on 2011 analyses, approximately 35% of adults and 20% of children under the age of 19 years were considered obese. These percentages convert to approximately 60 million obese people in the United States alone. Estimates suggest that by 2030, the percentage of obese people will rise to 42%, adding on about 32 million more individuals, and an additional financial burden of $550 billion due to health care costs alone. As health economist Eric Finkelstein notes, these costs are joined by others, including the billions of dollars lost due to lack of productivity, and the billions of dollars added for transportation costs, including lowered fuel efficiency and shifts in the size and seating dimensions of vehicles
¹⁴
.

There are many pathways to obesity, just as there are for other addictive behaviors. Several researchers suggest, however, that obesity is caused by changes in the reward system and a diminished capacity for self-control. When obese individuals view images of food during a brain scanning session, they show lower levels of activity in the
striatum
than individuals of normal weight; the striatum is an area rich in dopamine and an essential part of the reward system. This pattern may, at first, seem paradoxical: how could those who eat to excess show lower rather than higher levels of activity in the striatum, and thus, an over-the-top experience of reward upon seeing food? The answer lies in the brain’s response to excess consumption: overeat and the reward knob shuts down. Under normal conditions, this is an adaptive response as it prevents overdoing it. When this same system operates in the mind of an overweight person, it is a disaster. Though the feedback from the reward center is closed, the food addict still wants a fix. With motivation on high, he continues to seek food, hoping to satisfy his desire. This cycle continues, often with devastating consequences. It is a cycle that is shared with other addictions, revealing that the systems that break down when we turn to excess work similarly whether the target is food, drugs, alcohol, gambling, or, I suggest, violence. It is a malfunction that reveals what happens when you unhinge desire from the experience of reward.

The work on addictive behavior tells us that independently of how people get started on the path to fulfilling their desires, and whatever leads them to over-consume, consumption loses its luster. The brain is smart: excess is bad and so the reward system shuts off. This creates a major problem because the wanting system is still turned on, looking for pleasure in all the wrong places. The result: unfulfilled cravings.

The work on addiction provides a template for thinking about how individuals step onto a path that leads to excessive harms. In the same way that excessive eating gets going and going out of control when the dopamine system drives an irrational desire to want more and more food that is liked less and less, so too I suggest can excessive harm arise when wanting and liking part company. Individuals start with a desire to acquire wealth, to physically harm those who are unlike them, or taste the sweetness of revenge against someone who acted unfairly. These desires are often linked to a rewarding experience or the anticipation of one, a point I will soon support with evidence. But as such actions and their consequences accumulate, the pleasure derived diminishes. Liking is no longer part of the equation; but wanting is. The result: unsatisfied cravings blind individuals to the harms caused.

To develop the analogy between food, drug, alcohol and gambling addictions on the one hand, and addictions to violence on the other, I need to fill in several missing pieces, starting first with a richer description of the psychology of desire. Everything I have discussed in this section has focused on individuals and their core corporal needs for survival — or in the case of drugs and gambling, recreation. I haven’t said a word about how desire works in the social arena, whether the same systems are in play when we compare our own desires and resources with others, or with other opportunities. When desire is motivated by what others have or have achieved, are the same processes in play as when we eat, drink, or gamble? These are important questions as the desire to accumulate great wealth or to harm others is often motivated by comparison shopping, assessing what others have relative to our own status. The most primal starting point for comparison shopping is the world of hierarchies, a world where the desire to dominate rules.

Power hungry

In social insects, fish, lizards, birds, rodents, whales, apes, or humans, males are bigger and bolder, more boisterous, brash and brazen, and more motivated to get into a brawl than females. Though biologists don’t define the sexes based on these differences, they use them to understand what drives competition for valuable resources and what determines the criteria for dominance status. Biologists define the sexes based on differences in the gonads, the reproductive organs that generate eggs and sperm, and the corresponding effects of sex-specific selection on the mind, body, and behavior. Females are those with larger, more costly gonads, where cost is defined on the basis of how much energy is invested in production. Think eggs versus sperm. This difference sets up an immediate competition, especially for species that have parental care. Once you invest in a big expensive egg, you don’t want to lose your investment. You want to protect it, avoiding harm and minimizing risk. On the other hand, if your investment is small, as is the case for sperm, you are not only freer to take risks, but favored by selection to do so.

These ideas about sexual selection started with Charles Darwin. One hundred years later, they were developed in detail by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Combined, they provide an explanation for why, in most species including our own, males compete with each other for access to females — the most valuable and limited resource — and why females are picky, expressing an aesthetic preference for males of a particular quality. Selection favors parts of the body and brain associated with dominant males and picky females. Dominant males win fights against other males, and thus gain greater access to females. Dominant males take risks and are more aggressive. Picky females hold out for the best males, those who provide the most desirable resources. Picky females are patient, waiting for males with good genes, access to prime real estate, and the protective skills and motivation to defend them and their young. These are qualities linked to high status. These are qualities associated with the ability to obtain and control resources. These are the qualities that females desire and are motivated to obtain.

What these basic evolutionary processes lead to is a tango of desires, a topic that will occupy us in
chapter 3
. For now, the key point is that across all socially living animals, study after study supports the conclusion that male desire for dominance swings with female desire for dominant males. This dance leads males to evolve ever more powerful means of winning, and pushes females to be ever more discriminating and demanding in terms of a male’s qualifications as a mate
¹⁵
.

Given the push for increasing means of winning and discriminating, there is a premium on social information. Information about a competitor’s weakness or the quality of a mate, provides an upper hand in fighting and reproducing. The neuroscientist Michael Platt carried out a clever series of experiments with male rhesus monkeys to explore how much individuals would pay to gain access to socially relevant information. To set the stage, keep in mind that rhesus monkeys are a hyper-aggressive species with a strict dominance hierarchy: high ranking individuals outcompete lower ranking individuals for food, places to rest, and mates. If someone tries to step out of line, and gets caught, the costs can be extreme. In the heat of the mating season on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, I have witnessed high ranking male rhesus monkeys pin down lower ranking males trying to sneak a mating, rip into their groin with knife-like canines, and extract one testicle. Hyper-aggressive, competitive, and costly for the loser.

In Platt’s experiment, each monkey watched a slide show with viewing options akin to pay-per-view television. On a given trial, they could watch one of two images for as long as they liked, each viewing option associated with a particular amount of juice. For each pair of images, one delivered more juice than the other. Given that these monkeys were thirsty, they should prefer more juice over less juice. If monkeys have no interest in the images per se — because they have no value — then their viewing preferences should be strictly determined by where they can get the most juice. If, on the other hand, the images have value, and some images are more valuable than others, then they may be willing to look at an image that delivers less juice over an image that delivers more. This is paying for viewing, and a proxy for their motivation and desire for juice. Evidence that rhesus monkeys value the social information that comes from the image over the juice itself would be a surprising result given that juice is a primary reward whereas the image is only a secondary reward — an indication or cue of things to come.