The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

  As we saw in chapter 8, cuteness is a nuisance to conservation biologists because it attracts disproportionate concern for a few charismatic mammals. One organization figured they might as well put the response to good use and branded itself with the doe-eyed panda. The same trick is used by humanitarian organizations who find photogenic children for their ad campaigns. The psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has shown that juries treat defendants with more juvenile facial features more sympathetically, a travesty of justice we can attribute to the workings of our sense of sympathy.36 Physical beauty is yet another sympathy-induced injustice. Unattractive children are punished more harshly by parents and teachers and are more likely to be victims of abuse.37 Unattractive adults are judged to be less honest, kind, trustworthy, sensitive, and even intelligent.38

  Of course, we do manage to sympathize with our adult friends and relatives, including the ugly ones. But even then our sympathy is spread not indiscriminately but within a delimited circle within which we apply a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy has to work in concert with these other emotions because social life cannot be a radiation of warm and fuzzy feelings in all directions. Friction is unavoidable in social life: toes get stepped on, noses put out of joint, fur rubbed the wrong way. Together with sympathy we feel guilt and forgiveness, and these emotions tend to apply within the same circle: the people we sympathize with are the people we feel guilty about hurting and the people we find easiest to forgive when they hurt us.39 Roy Baumeister, Arlene Stillwell, and Todd Heatherton reviewed the social-psychological literature on guilt and found that it went hand in hand with empathy. More empathic people are also more guilt-prone (particularly women, who excel at both emotions), and it is the targets of our empathy who engage our guilt. The effect is enormous: when people are asked to recall incidents that made them feel guilty, 93 percent involved families, friends, and lovers; only 7 percent involved acquaintances or strangers. The proportions were similar when it came to memories of eliciting guilt: we guilt-trip our friends and families, not acquaintances and strangers.

  Baumeister and his collaborators explain the pattern with a distinction we will return to in the section on morality. Sympathy and guilt, they note, operate within a circle of communal relationships.40 They are less likely to be felt in exchange or equality-matching relationships, the kind we have with acquaintances, neighbors, colleagues, associates, clients, and service providers. Exchange relationships are regulated by norms of fairness and are accompanied by emotions that are cordial rather than genuinely sympathetic. When we harm them or they harm us, we can explicitly negotiate the fines, refunds, and other forms of compensation that rectify the harm. When that is not possible, we reduce our distress by distancing ourselves from them or derogating them. The businesslike quid pro quo negotiations that can repair an exchange relationship are, we shall see, generally taboo in our communal relationships, and the option of severing a communal relationship comes with a high cost.41 So we repair our communal relationships with the messier but longer-lasting emotional glue of sympathy, guilt, and forgiveness.

  So what are the prospects that we can expand the circle of sympathy outward from babies, fuzzy animals, and the people bound to us in communal relationships, to lasso in larger and larger sets of strangers? One set of predictions comes from the theory of reciprocal altruism and its implementation in Tit for Tat and other strategies that are “nice” in the technical sense that they cooperate on the first move and don’t defect until defected upon. If people are nice in this sense, they should have some tendency to be sympathetic to strangers, with the ultimate (that is, evolutionary) goal of probing for the possibility of a mutually beneficial relationship.42 Sympathy should be particularly likely to spring into action when an opportunity presents itself to confer a large benefit to another person at a relatively small cost to oneself, that is, when we come across a person in need. It should also be fired up where there are common interests that grease the skids toward a mutually beneficial relationship, such as having similar values and belonging to a common coalition.

  Neediness, like cuteness, is a general elicitor of sympathy. Even toddlers go out of their way to help someone in difficulty or to comfort someone in distress.43 In his studies of empathy, Batson found that when students are faced with someone in need, such as a patient recovering from leg surgery, they respond with sympathy even when the needy one falls outside their usual social circle. The sympathy is triggered whether the patient is a fellow student, an older stranger, a child, or even a puppy.44 The other day I came across an overturned horseshoe crab on the beach, its dozen legs writhing uselessly in the air. When I righted it and it slithered beneath the waves, I felt a surge of happiness.

  With less easily helped individuals, a perception of shared values and other kinds of similarity makes a big difference.45 In a seminal experiment, the psychologist Dennis Krebs had student participants watch a second (fake) participant play a perverse game of roulette that paid him whenever the ball landed on an even number and shocked him when it landed on an odd number. 46 The player had been introduced either as a fellow student in the same field who had a similar personality, or as a nonstudent with a dissimilar personality. When the participants thought they were similar to the player, they sweated and their hearts pounded more when they saw him get shocked. They said they felt worse while anticipating his shock and were more willing to get shocked themselves and forgo payments to spare their counterpart additional pain.

  Krebs explained the sacrifice of his participants on behalf of their fellows with an idea he called the empathy-altruism hypothesis: empathy encourages altruism.47 The word empathy, as we have seen, is ambiguous, and so we are really dealing with two hypotheses. One, based on the “sympathy” sense, is that our emotional repertoire includes a state in which another person’s well-being matters to us—we are pleased when the person is happy, and upset when he or she is not—and that this state motivates us to help them with no ulterior motive. If true, this idea—let’s call it the sympathy-altruism hypothesis—would refute a pair of old theories called psychological hedonism, according to which people only do things that give them pleasure, and psychological egoism, according to which people only do things that provide them with a benefit. Of course there are circular versions of these theories, in which the very fact that a person helps someone is taken as proof that it must feel good or benefit him, if only to scratch an altruistic itch. But any testable version of these cynical theories must identify some independent ulterior motive for the help extended, such as assuaging one’s own distress, avoiding public censure, or garnering public esteem.

  The word altruism is ambiguous too. The “altruism” in the empathy-altruism hypothesis is altruism in the psychological sense of a motive to benefit another organism as an end in itself rather than as a means to some other end.48 This differs from altruism in the evolutionary biologist’s sense, which is defined in terms of behavior rather than motives: biological altruism consists of behavior that benefits another organism at a cost to oneself.49 (Biologists use the term to help distinguish the two ways in which one organism can benefit another. The other way is called mutualism, where an organism benefits another one while also benefiting itself, as with an insect pollinating a plant, a bird eating ticks off the back of a mammal, and roommates with similar tastes enjoying each other’s music.)

  In practice, the biologist’s and psychologist’s sense of altruism often coincide, because if we have a motive to do something, we’re often willing to incur a cost to do it. And despite a common misunderstanding, evolutionary explanations for biological altruism (such as that organisms benefit their kin or exchange favors, both of which help their genes in the long run) are perfectly compatible with psychological altruism. If natural selection favored costly helping of relatives or of potential reciprocation partners because of the long-term benefits to the genes, it did so by endowing the brain with a direct motive to help those beneficiaries, with no thought of its own welfare. The fact that th
e altruist’s genes may benefit in the long run does not expose the altruist as a hypocrite or undermine her altruistic motives, because the genetic benefit never figures as an explicit goal in her brain.50

  The first version of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, then, is that psychological altruism exists, and that it is motivated by the emotion we call sympathy. The second version is based on the “projection” and “perspective-taking” senses of empathy.51 According to this hypothesis, adopting someone’s viewpoint, whether by imagining oneself in his or her shoes or imagining what it is like to be that person, induces a state of sympathy for the person (which would then impel the perspective-taker to act altruistically toward the target if the sympathy-altruism hypothesis is true as well). One might call this the perspective-sympathy hypothesis. This is the hypothesis relevant to the question raised in chapters 4 and 5 of whether journalism, memoir, fiction, history, and other technologies of vicarious experience have expanded our collective sense of sympathy and helped drive the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions.

  Though Batson doesn’t always distinguish the two versions of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, his two-decade-long research project has supported both of them.52

  Let’s start with the sympathy-altruism hypothesis and compare it to the cynical alternative in which people help others only to reduce their own distress. Participants in one study watched an ersatz fellow participant, Elaine, get repeatedly shocked in a learning experiment.53 (The male participants were introduced to Charlie rather than Elaine.) Elaine becomes visibly upset as the session proceeds, and the participant is given an opportunity to take her place. In one condition, the participant has finished her obligation to the experimenter and is free to leave, so taking Elaine’s place would be genuinely altruistic. In another, the participant doesn’t take Elaine’s place and has to watch Elaine get shocked for another eight sessions. Batson reasoned that if the only reason people volunteer to take poor Elaine’s place is to reduce their own distress at the sight of her suffering, they won’t bother if they are free to leave. Only if they have to endure the sight and sound of her moaning will they prefer to get shocked themselves. As in Krebs’s experiment, the participant’s sympathy was manipulated by telling her either that she and Elaine had the same values and interests, or that they had incompatible ones (for example, if the participant read Newsweek, Elaine would be described as reading Cosmo and Seventeen). Sure enough, when participants felt themselves to be similar to Elaine, they relieved her of being shocked, whether or not they had to watch her suffer. If they felt themselves to be different, they took her place only when the alternative was to watch the suffering. Together with other studies, the experiment suggests that by default people help others egoistically, to relieve their own distress at having to watch them suffer. But when they sympathize with a victim, they are overcome by a motive to reduce her suffering whether it eases their distress or not.

  Another set of experiments tested a second ulterior motive to helping, namely the desire to be seen as doing the socially acceptable thing.54 This time, rather than manipulating sympathy experimentally, Batson and his collaborators exploited the fact that people spontaneously vary in how sympathetic they feel. After the participants heard Elaine worrying aloud about the impending shocks, they were asked to indicate the degree to which they felt sympathetic, moved, compassionate, tender, warm, and soft-hearted. Some participants wrote high numbers next to these adjectives; others wrote low ones.

  Once the procedure began, and long-suffering Elaine started getting zapped and was visibly unhappy about it, the experimenters used sneaky ways of assessing whether any desire on the part of the participants to relieve her distress sprang from pure beneficence or a desire to look good. One study tapped the participants’ mood with a questionnaire, and then either gave them the opportunity to relieve Elaine by doing well on a task of their own, or simply dismissed Elaine without the participant being able to claim any credit. The empathizers felt equally relieved in both cases; the nonempathizers only if they were the ones that set her free. In another, the participants had to qualify for an opportunity to take Elaine’s place by scoring well in a letterfinding task they had been led to believe was either easy (so there was no way to fake a bad performance and get off the hook) or hard (so they could take a dive and plausibly get out of being asked to make the sacrifice). The nonempathizers took the dive and did worse in the so-called hard task; the empathizers did even better on the hard task, where they knew an extra effort would be needed to allow them to suffer in Elaine’s stead. The emotion of sympathy, then, can lead to genuine moral concern in Kant’s sense of treating a person as an end and not a means to an end—in this case, not even as a means to the end of feeling good about having helped the person.

  In these experiments, a person was rescued from a harm caused by someone else, the experimenter. Does sympathy-induced altruism dampen one’s own tendency to exploit someone, or to retaliate in response to a provocation? It does. In other experiments, Batson had women play a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma in which they and a (fictitious) fellow participant bid cards that could net them various numbers of raffle tickets, framed as a business transaction.55 Most of the time they did what game theorists say is the optimal strategy: they defected. They chose to bid a card that protected them against being a sucker and that offered them the chance to exploit their partner, while leaving them with a worse outcome than if the two of them had cooperated by bidding a different card. But when the participant read a personal note from her otherwise anonymous partner and was induced to feel empathy for her, her rate of cooperating jumped from 20 percent to 70 percent. In a second experiment, a new group of women played an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game, which gave them an opportunity to retaliate against a partner’s defection with a defection of their own. They cooperated in response to a defection only 5 percent of the time. But when they were induced beforehand to empathize with their partner, they were far more forgiving, and cooperated 45 percent of the time.56 Sympathy, then, can mitigate self-defeating exploitation and costly retaliation.

  In these experiments, sympathy was manipulated indirectly, by varying the similarity in values between a participant and the target, or it was entirely endogenous: the experimenters counted on some participants spontaneously being more empathic than others, for whatever reason. The key question for understanding the decline of violence is whether sympathy can be pushed around exogenously.

  Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that creates a communal relationship, then, should also create sympathy. A prime communality-builder is inducing people to cooperate in a project with a superordinate goal. (The classic example is the warring boys at the Robbers Cave camp, who had to pull together to haul a bus out of the mud.) Many conflict-resolution workshops operate by a similar principle: they bring adversaries together in friendly surroundings where they get to know each other as individuals, and they are tasked with the superordinate goal of figuring out how to resolve the conflict. These circumstances can induce mutual sympathy, and the workshops often try to help it along with exercises in which the participants adopt each other’s viewpoints.57 But in all these cases, cooperation is being forced upon the participants, and it’s obviously impractical to get billions of people together in supervised conflict-resolution workshops.

  The most powerful exogenous sympathy trigger would be one that is cheap, widely available, and already in place, namely the perspective-taking that people engage in when they consume fiction, memoir, autobiography, and reportage. So the next question in the science of empathy is whether perspective-taking from media consumption actually engages sympathy for the writers and talking heads, and for members of the groups they represent.

  In several studies the Batson team convinced participants they were helping with market research for the university radio station.58They were asked to
evaluate a pilot show called News from the Personal Side, a program that aimed to “go beyond the facts of local events to report how these events affect the lives of the individuals involved.” One set of participants was asked to “focus on the technical aspects of the broadcast” and “take an objective perspective toward what is described,” not getting caught up in the feelings of the interview subject. Another set was asked to “imagine how the person who is interviewed feels about what has happened and how it has affected his or her life”—a manipulation of perspective-taking that ought to instill a state of sympathy. Admittedly, the manipulation is a bit ham-handed: people are not generally told how to think and feel as they read a book or watch the news. But writers know that audiences are most engaged in a story when there is a protagonist whose viewpoint they are seduced into taking, as in the old advice to aspiring scriptwriters, “Find a hero; put him in trouble.” So presumably real media also rope their audiences into sympathy with a lead character without the need for explicit orders.

  A first experiment showed that the sympathy induced by perspective-taking was as sincere as the kind found in the studies of shocked Elaine.59 Participants listened to an interview with Katie, who lost her parents in a car crash and was struggling to bring up her younger siblings. They were later presented with an opportunity to help her out in small ways, such as babysitting and giving her lifts. The experimenters manipulated the sign-up sheet so that it looked either as if a lot of students had put their names down, creating peer pressure for them to do the same, or as if only two had, allowing the students to feel comfortable ignoring her plight. The participants who had focused on the technical aspects of the interview signed up to help only if many of their peers had done so; the ones who had listened from Katie’s point of view signed up regardless of what their peers had done.