Us and Them: The Blog

Feeling Pure and Doing Bad (Part 2)

A while back I linked to an interesting study in which people who made themselves physically cleaner were less leery of being morally dirty. I suggested that rituals of purification and cleanliness can be a means to separate people from their intuitive moral sense -- to make them feel less bad about moral filth because they feel themselves to be clean.

Another bit of evidence that (I would argue) supports this idea: This report on a recent study about self-image and behavior. Two groups of people were asked how much they'd like to donate to their favorite charity, between $0 and $10. Some had been asked to write essays about their moral failings -- they had to use words like ``greedy'' and ``selfish.'' Others were asked to write about their own goodness -- they had to use words like ``generous'' and ``kind.''

People who had been primed to see their ethical failures gave much more money (an average of $5.30) to charity. Those encouraged to feel good about their behavior gave an average of $1.07.

Two possible take-aways: First, there is such a thing as too much self-esteem. Second, when our religious, political and cultural institutions encourage us to see ourselves as ``good,'' they may well be making it easier for us to be bad. Might be worth viewing our feel-good rituals with this skeptical eye.

Post-Rational Economic Man

Our social institutions are premised on the theory that individuals are rational, about themselves and their choices, if not about the larger world. As evidence mounts that this is not true, what happens to those institutions -- to courts, elections, markets, medical care?

I think a lot will happen. Many of us have no problem accepting the news that we don't really know what we're doing as we make our choices in life. The trouble will come when this account of the mind collides with presumptions that organize our world -- presumptions, for example, that voters, stock traders and shoppers know how and why they make their decisions.

So when John Brockman's annual question at Edge.org turned out to be ``What Will Change Everything?'' I nominated the new models of the mind emerging from behavioral economics, social cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines.

Pure rites and dirty deeds

Before they set out on their mission, the September 11 hijackers purified themselves, body and soul. According to instructions found after the attacks, they were told to shower, and ``shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne.'' They also were to read the Koran, ponder their spiritual life, and pronounce blessings over their clothes, knives, passports and other effects.

Why did they do this? Why, more generally, do religiously-motivated rites and enterprises often have a component of hand-washing, house-cleaning, clothes-laundering, and so on?

It's easy to imagine a simple-minded association: Bodily cleanness promoting the spiritual kind. But perhaps there's another explanation.

Perhaps the point of religious purification is merely to separate the believer from everyday hunches and impulses about his behavior.

Such a separation from common sense could, of course, cause a believer to be more attentive to moral principles and their associated emotions. But that's not the only possible consequence. A break with ordinary moral rules-of-thumb could be a license to ignore everyday politeness and everyday desires for safety -- not to speak of morally charged feelings like empathy, guilt and fear.

The grubby, dusty, incoherent moral life of an ordinary household's ordinary Tuesday is much disparaged by many religions. But that life leaves most people with the feeling that they should behave decently to others. That they should not kill strangers. That they have a right, if not a duty, to preserve their own lives. Soldiers have to be trained to set these hunches aside. So did the hijackers, to judge by another passage in their instructions:

Remind your soul to listen and obey and remember that you will face decisive situations that might prevent you from 100 percent obedience [...]

Religions demand that people do many things that don't automatically ''feel right.'' Perhaps cleaning up, with its attendant physical feeling of ``I'm all right,'' helps suppress psychic feelings of ``I'm doing something weird, even wrong.'' Feelings that can arise if one is called to murder innocent people. Or suppress one's natural human sexuality. Or refuse food made the ``wrong'' way. Or engage, on a Sunday morning, in a rite described as literally eating God's flesh and drinking his blood.

What brings all this to mind is this report in The Economist, about a new study (pdf) by Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth. Schnall is interested in the interaction of physical and moral emotion -- for example, the way, as Paul Rozin showed years ago, that physical disgust makes people more prone to moral disgust.

In that vein, Schnall and her students posed ethical questions to people split into two groups. One consisted of people who'd been told to wash their hands before the session. Those people were more accepting of violations of what I've called common-sense morality (among Schnall's examples were using a kitten for sexual purposes, or taking money found in a lost wallet) than were the unwashed group. The same contrast emerged even if the distinction wasn't about a physical act. A group primed with words like ``pure'', ``washed'' and ``pristine'' also proved more accepting of moral violations than did a group primed with neutral words instead.

Physical cleanliness, of course, protects a person from disgust with himself. Schnall's evidence suggests that this protection can extend from the physical to the psychic realm. Showered, shaved, sweet-smelling in their cologne and blessed shirts, the 9/11 hijackers illustrate exactly why this fact of human nature is no blessing.

You-Heard-It-Here-First Department

A theme I kept returning to in Us and Them was the power of direct, personal experience on a mind that is always classifying and reclassifying people into groups. As I mentioned in the book, the Muslim-Christian division counts for a lot in Lebanon, but it was not difficult for experimenters there to create conditions in a summer camp that made its teen-age residents care much more about the boundary between Blue Ghosts and Red Devils. They were two gangs they had created on the spot, both of which were a mix of Christians and Muslims.

The depressing aspect of this idea is that people can decide that a Star Trek identity is the center of their lives. But the positive aspect is that people can easily drop longstanding ideas about ``others.''

Flash forward to last week, and this report about simple exercises that reduce people's scores on measures of prejudice. Four hours of conversation and parlor games with total strangers -- played with people of other races or ethnicities -- is all it takes, Benedict Carey writes (and the whole piece is very much worth reading):

``Trivial as they may sound, those exercises create a relationship `that is as close as any relationship the person has,' said Art Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University who developed the program with his wife, Elaine N. Aron.''

Why ``divorce genes'' are a nonsensical distortion of science

In sea of idiotic coverage about the latest claims about a link between genes and behavior, only the guy at Wired gets it right.

What's So Bad About Conformity?

Everything, was the idea I was raised on. The individual who stands against the crowd must be a hero. The sinister pressure of the herd leads only to evil.

I think this research was based on assumptions conditioned by the experience of World War II and the Cold War. Psychologists focussed on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes -- rather than the non-conformity of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao, which told each that he alone would remake the world. (After all, what better example of ``think different'' could there be than Mao, who cursed his father every day of his life and burned the Confucian classics?)

Now, with more distance, psychologists have new takes on some of the classic parables of their field. Among these: the experiments by Sherif and Asch in which people change their minds about something in response to group pressure; the Milgram studies on obedience to authority; and the Kitty Genovese case (in which 38 people supposedly witnessed a murder and did nothing -- a deeply shocking story whose one flaw is that it is not true).

Outside of psychology, there are other signs of change around the idea of ``conformity'' as simple and necessarily bad. Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, which I recently reviewed here, details how ``rational economic man'' has been overthrown as a model for how people make decisions. In place of a model that says individuals tally up information and calculate their strategies, behavioral economics recognizes the reality that in decision making we're usually responding to how we feel about our relationships to other people. Moreover, as Ariely says, the discipline recognizes that this valuing of social relationships is not a bad thing.

And then there's the recent work of the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford, trying to account for an interesting fact about religious terrorists: A disproportionate number of them are engineers. For example, of the 25 9/11 hijackers, 8 were trained in engineering. Gambetta and Hertog propose that there is an ``engineering mindset,'' part of which involves a predilection for thinking that there are correct, perfect solutions to problems -- solutions which don't admit, I think, of compromise with others' feelings or conventions.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this idea -- the paper is here as a pdf. But I do think the paper is another sign that the old concept of ``conformity'' is being rebuilt.

There was, until lately, a moralistic and monolithic notion of ``conformity'' as a kind of illness or pollution undermining the gloriously free-thinking individual. That's being replaced by a more supple model of ``conformist'' behavior emerging and subsiding as people go about their lives, balancing their respect for others, and for human relationships, against their own subjective experiences and impulses.

I describe this change in this piece in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Blood Sports

Curious evidence about the link between sports and violence. Daniel I. Rees of the University of Colorado found that assaults and other mayhem increase after college football games, which is not super-surprising. The surprising part is that the amount of the increase in violence depends the outcome of the game. Assaults and vandalism go up the most, Rees found, after an upset -- and it didn't matter whether, for the home team, that upset was a surprise loss or a surprise win. Upsets of either type were followed by a spike in assaults. College sports have all sorts of bad effects on society, which the sports-loving elite refuses to count (for instance, college football brings revenue to the schools, which is tabulated to the last dime, but, as Rees points out, who offsets those figures by the costs of the crime the games impose on the surrounding areas?). But at least this time, it's an interestingly bad effect.

Sports are to good character as fish are to elevator repair

There is race, religion, nation, culture, ideology -- all of these categories can serve as the basis for unreasoning hatred and violence toward the ``wrong'' people. Organized sports, on the other hand, are supposed to be good for us all, promoting good character in individuals and peaceful comity in society. It's costly nonsense. Sports passions can have the same hateful effect as those of nation, religion or faction. That was true long ago. And in living memory. And the day before yesterday.

Innateness weirdness

Two new studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ingeniously add to the evidence that the mind has built-in proclivities about where to put its attention. The first found that people are more attentive to movements by animals than by cars and trucks. Even people who grew up around vehicles, in urban environments, were more likely to notice an animal's roadside movement than a car's. In the second, people's decisions about another person were affected by what others said -- even when the ``gossip'' added nothing to what they already knew.

Trust, attention and identity: Animal edition

On a single page in the June 9 issue of the weekly New Scientist come two evocative reports about communication and trust. One recounts that elephant herds respond only to the alarm calls of familiar voices. If they hear a taped ``lion warning'' from a strange herd, they don't take the usual defensive action. It seems odd, as a lion is a lion, but it suggests that even in elephants communication is not just about information -- it's also about ``who'' is sending the message, and if s/he is ``one of us.''

The other brief story explains how magpie lark pairs sing duets better the longer they are together -- and the duets of the long-coupled evoke more responses in other birds than less skilled singing. Another instance in which the message tells about the messenger, and its relation to other members of its species.

And speaking of trust and identity, I was tempted to go to the original papers in these two instances, thus skipping any mention of New Scientist and making myself look better informed than I am. I think that's what New Scientist did to me recently with this piece on prejudice.

It reviews the issues I cover in my book, mentions a number of people I write about (few of whom are household names) yet gives me no mention. Could be a coincidence, but in my opinion it's an instance of a common journalist's dodge: Get information from a peer, but attribute it only to the experts and archives.

In our guild, there is a premium on information that comes from those who are not members. That is, after all, the job: Seek knowledge from the wide world. When we cite each other, we look as if we haven't done the work, and so we excise our colleagues -- in the same spirit that foreign correspondents seldom mention the local ``fixer'' who translates, locates and generates much of their material. In every journalistic job I have had, I witnessed this sort of trimming. One of the idols of our tribe, I guess.

Not having enjoyed being on the receiving end of the process (and recognizing the slim chance that I could, after all, be mistaken) I'll give NS the credit where it is due.