The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (109 page)

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Authors: Steven Pinker

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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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A nervousness about the use of deadly force may also be seen in street fights and barroom brawls. Most confrontations between macho ruffians are nothing like the stupendous fistfights in Hollywood westerns that so impressed Nabokov’s Humbert, with “the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle.” The sociologist Randall Collins has scrutinized photographs, videotapes, and eyewitness accounts of real fights and found that they are closer to a two-minute penalty for roughing in a boring hockey game than an action-packed brawl in Roaring Gulch.
15
Two men glower, talk trash, swing and miss, clutch each other, sometimes fall to the ground. Occasionally a fist will emerge from the mutual embrace and land a couple of blows, but more often the men will separate, trade angry bluster and face-saving verbiage, and walk away with their egos more bruised than their bodies.
It’s true, then, that when men confront each other in face-to-face conflict, they often exercise restraint. But this reticence is not a sign that humans are gentle and compassionate. On the contrary, it’s just what one would expect from the analyses of violence by Hobbes and Darwin. Recall from chapter 2 that any tendency toward violence must have evolved in a world in which everyone else was evolving the same tendency. (As Richard Dawkins put it, a living thing differs from a rock or a river because it is inclined to hit back.) That means that the first move toward harming a fellow human simultaneously accomplishes two things:
1. It increases the chance that the target will come to harm.
2. It gives the target an overriding goal of harming you before you harm him.
Even if you prevail by killing him, you will have given his kin the goal of killing you in revenge. It stands to reason that initiating serious aggression in a symmetrical standoff is something a Darwinian creature must consider very, very carefully—a reticence experienced as anxiety or paralysis. Discretion is the better part of valor; compassion has nothing to do with it.
When an opportunity does arise to eliminate a hated opponent with little danger of reprisal, a Darwinian creature will seize on it. We saw this in chimpanzee raiding. When a group of males patrolling a territory encounters a male from another community who has been isolated from his fellows, they will take advantage of the strength in numbers and tear him limb from limb. Pre-state peoples too decimate their enemies not in pitched battles but in stealthy ambushes and raids. Much of human violence is cowardly violence: sucker punches, unfair fights, preemptive strikes, predawn raids, mafia hits, drive-by shootings.
Collins also documents a recurring syndrome that he calls
forward panic
, though a more familiar term would be
rampage
. When an aggressive coalition has stalked or faced off against an opponent in a prolonged state of apprehension and fear, then catches the opponent in a moment of vulnerability, fear turns to rage, and the men will explode in a savage frenzy. A seemingly unstoppable fury drives them to beat the enemy senseless, torture and mutilate the men, rape the women, and destroy their property. A forward panic is violence at its ugliest. It is the state of mind that causes genocides, massacres, deadly ethnic riots, and battles in which no prisoners are taken. It also lies behind episodes of police brutality, such as the savage beating of Rodney King in 1991 after he had been apprehended in a high-speed car chase and had violently resisted his arrest. As the butchery gains momentum, rage may give way to ecstasy, and the rampagers may laugh and whoop in a carnival of barbarity.
16
No one has to be trained to carry out a rampage, and when they erupt in armies or police squads the commanders are often taken by surprise and have to take steps to quell them, since the overkill and atrocities serve no military or law-enforcement purpose. A rampage may be a primitive adaptation to seize a fleeting opportunity to decisively rout a dangerous enemy before it can remobilize and retaliate. The resemblance to lethal raiding among chimpanzees is uncanny, including the common trigger: an isolated member of the enemy who is outnumbered by a cluster of three or four allies.
17
The instinct behind rampages suggests that the human behavioral repertoire includes scripts for violence that lie quiescent and may be cued by propitious circumstances, rather than building up over time like hunger or thirst.
THE MORALIZATION GAP AND THE MYTH OF PURE EVIL
 
In
The Blank Slate
I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature—the doctrine of the Noble Savage—was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientists and scholars who question the modern doctrine have been accused of
justifying
violence and have been subjected to vilification, blood libel, and physical assault.
18
The Noble Savage myth appears to be another instance of an antiviolence movement leaving a cultural legacy of propriety and taboo.
But I am now convinced that a denial of the human capacity for evil runs even deeper, and may itself be a feature of human nature, thanks to a brilliant analysis by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book
Evil
.
19
Baumeister was moved to study the commonsense understanding of evil when he noticed that the people who perpetrate destructive acts, from everyday peccadilloes to serial murders and genocides, never think they are doing anything wrong. How can there be so much evil in the world with so few evil people doing it?
When psychologists are confronted with a timeless mystery, they run an experiment. Baumeister and his collaborators Arlene Stillwell and Sara Wotman couldn’t very well get people to commit atrocities in the lab, but they reasoned that everyday life has its share of smaller hurts that they could put under the microscope.
20
They asked people to describe one incident in which someone angered them, and one incident in which they angered someone. The order of the two questions was randomly flipped from one participant to the next, and they were separated by a busywork task so the participants wouldn’t answer them in quick succession. Most people get angry at least once a week, and nearly everyone gets angry at least once a month, so there was no shortage of material.
21
Both perpetrators and victims recounted plenty of lies, broken promises, violated rules and obligations, betrayed secrets, unfair acts, and conflicts over money.
But that was all that the perpetrators and victims agreed on. The psychologists pored over the narratives and coded features such as the time span of the events, the culpability of each side, the perpetrator’s motive, and the aftermath of the harm. If one were to weave composite narratives out of their tallies, they might look something like this:
The Perpetrator’s Narrative:
The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any reasonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it’s unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apologized. It’s time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones.
The Victim’s Narrative:
The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator’s actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it.it.
 
They can’t both be right—or more to the point, neither of them can be right all of the time, since the same participants provided a story in which they were the victim and a story in which they were the perpetrator. Something in human psychology distorts our interpretation and memory of harmful events.
This raises an obvious question. Does our inner perpetrator whitewash our crimes in a campaign to exonerate ourselves? Or does our inner victim nurse our grievances in a campaign to claim the world’s sympathy? Since the psychologists were not flies on the wall at the time of the actual incidents, they had no way of knowing whose retrospective accounts should be trusted.
In an ingenious follow-up, Stillwell and Baumeister
controlled
the event by writing an ambiguous story in which one college roommate offers to help another with some coursework but reneges for a number of reasons, which leads the student to receive a low grade for the course, change his or her major, and switch to another university.
22
The participants (students themselves) simply had to read the story and then retell it as accurately as possible in the first person, half of them taking the perspective of the perpetrator and half the perspective of the victim. A third group was asked to retell the story in the third person; the details they provided or omitted serve as a baseline for ordinary distortions of human memory that are unaffected by self-serving biases. The psychologists coded the narratives for missing or embellished details that would make either the perpetrator or the victim look better.
The answer to the question “Who should we believe?” turned out to be: neither. Compared to the benchmark of the story itself, and to the recall of the disinterested third-person narrators, both victims and perpetrators distorted the stories to the same extent but in opposite directions, each omitting or embellishing details in a way that made the actions of their character look more reasonable and the other’s less reasonable. Remarkably, nothing was at stake in the exercise. Not only had the participants not taken part in the events, but they were not asked to sympathize with the character or to justify anyone’s behavior, just to read and remember the story from a first-person perspective. That was all it took to recruit their cognitive processes to the cause of self-serving propaganda.
The diverging narratives of a harmful event in the eyes of the aggressor, the victim, and a neutral party are a psychological overlay on the violence triangle in figure 2–1. Let’s call it the Moralization Gap.
The Moralization Gap is part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. “Good” can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic. The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20th-century social psychology. An early exposé was the sociologist Erving Goffman’s
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,
and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s
Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me
), Robert Trivers’s
Deceit and Self-Deception,
and Robert Kurzban’s
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
.
23
Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.
24
Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals. People congregate in groups not because they are robots who are magnetically attracted to one another but because they have social and moral emotions. They feel warmth and sympathy, gratitude and trust, loneliness and guilt, jealousy and anger. The emotions are internal regulators that ensure that people reap the benefits of social life—reciprocal exchange and cooperative action—without suffering the costs, namely exploitation by cheaters and social parasites.
25
We sympathize with, trust, and feel grateful to those who are likely to cooperate with us, rewarding them with our own cooperation. And we get angry at or ostracize those who are likely to cheat, withdrawing cooperation or meting out punishment. A person’s own level of virtue is a tradeoff between the esteem that comes from cultivating a reputation as a cooperator and the ill-gotten gains of stealthy cheating. A social group is a marketplace of cooperators of differing degrees of generosity and trustworthiness, and people advertise themselves as being as generous and trustworthy as they can get away with, which may be a bit more generous and trustworthy than they are.
The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator. Like opposing counsel in a lawsuit over a tort, the social plaintiff will emphasize the deliberateness, or at least the depraved indifference, of the defendant’s action, together with the pain and suffering the plaintiff endures. The social defendant will emphasize the reasonableness or unavoidability of the action, and will minimize the plaintiff’s pain and suffering. The competing framings shape the negotiations over amends, and also play to the gallery in a competition for their sympathy and for a reputation as a responsible reciprocator.
26
Trivers, the first to propose that the moral emotions are adaptations to cooperation, also identified an important twist. The problem with trying to convey an exaggerated impression of kindness and skill is that other people are bound to develop the ability to see through it, setting in motion a psychological arms race between better liars and better lie detection. Lies can be spotted through internal contradictions (as in the Yiddish proverb “A liar must have a good memory”), or through tells such as hesitations, twitches, blushes, and sweats. Trivers ventured that natural selection may have favored a degree of
self
-deception so as to suppress the tells at the source. We lie to ourselves so that we’re more believable when we lie to others.
27
At the same time, an unconscious part of the mind registers the truth about our abilities so that we don’t get too far out of touch with reality. Trivers credits George Orwell with an earlier formulation of the idea: “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”
28

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