Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

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Themes

Doing the Right Thing When It’s the Harder Thing to Do

Naturally, in a book about aggression, compassion, morality, evil, and the contextual nature of all of these terms, the concept of “doing the right thing” comes up often. The specific topic of doing the right thing when it is the harder thing to do is “pertinent to every page of this book” (45) and comes up first in discussion of the frontal cortex (FC). One important role of the FC is reining in impulsivity by suppression of the amygdala. It is our frontal cortex that allows us to stop ourselves from eating more chocolate—the right thing, but hard—or stops us from cheating on our spouse. The FC also handles working memory and is therefore the structure that helps us remember an area code to a phone number (bringing a piece of data into working memory) and how to strategically place that number in another area, which prompts us to dial 1 first (47).

Doing the right thing when it is the harder thing to do comes up in several other brain systems as well. The dopaminergic system inspires us to work to achieve goals even though they are difficult (66). Testosterone makes us work to do “whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status” (106). The theme also comes up socially and in the application of science. To do the right thing with our criminal justice system would be a complete overhaul of its core assumptions, freeing thousands by dispensing of the intuitive concept of free will, integrating multifactorial neuroscientific analysis, and strictly limiting the emphasis on punishment to what is necessary for shaping via operant conditioning. While laudable, “none of this will be easy” (611). Only harder than that is resisting some of our deepest urges for hate, retributive justice, or cooperation with in-group members to engage more morally upright behaviors, like talking congenially with a genocidal general who imprisoned you for 27 years as Mandela did (578-79) or threatening to kill fellow soldiers to stop their atrocity of civilians as Hugh Thompson, Jr. did during the My Lai massacre (657).

Doing the right thing can mean doing what is correct for our thriving in a particularly social context (the testosterone example), what is right for our diet (the FC example), what is right for our career (the dopamine example), or what is right for humanity itself (the Mandela example). The through line between each example is the core complexity and flexibility of the human brain, its ability to define multiple rights and wrongs, define them contextually, and do the labor of pursuing them and refining them. There’s a reason “brains, rather than kidneys, write poetry” (687), as Appendix 1 states.

Biology’s Moral Relativism and the Unfortunate Utility of Evil

The moral value of our actions is not innate but depends on context. Oxytocin can inspire us to hug our child or to kill to protect them (117-18). Forming intense in-group/out-group distinctions via signaling of affiliation and metaphor can lead to genocide or the warm feelings of being loved by one’s family (423). Since the same biology undergirds these acts irrelevant of their consequences, biology is morally neutral.

However, biology teaches us two crucial things about morality. First, the same brain, a human one, came up with both deontological ethics (actions have innate moral value, irrelevant of consequence) and utilitarianism (the end, not the action, is the object of moral evaluation, the action is moral if it serves collective good). “When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC” (505). Understanding the specific sections of the brain that relate to these varied perspectives on morality and their outputs allows a new lease on our own morality that can be mobilized to shape us toward a more effectively good society. Second, and more important: “why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgements tend to be non-utilitarian because […] [o]ur moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes not to maximize our collective happiness” (505).

Many of our automatic thoughts and actions, and even a great deal of our rationalizations, lead us to or support genuinely immoral acts: seeing a face of another race as less human, fighting with other males for mates, lying, cheating, and infanticide. Does this excuse us from our immorality? No. Though the automaticity of our more unscrupulous human traits means we “probably need to be a bit easier on ourselves” in certain domains (551), still overall “saying that we advocate something just because we report it is like saying oncologists advocate cancer.” (385). The role of science is to observe, report, and offer data for grounded practices that can improve human behavior in this reality, not a historical one.

The Difficult but Necessary Pursuit of Multifactorial Analysis in Science

“The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial—that is the thesis of this book” (602).

The first half of Behave is a tour through the biological determinants of behavior, each chapter increasing the temporal and developmental scope. The purpose of providing this ever-widening scope is not to display Sapolsky’s great intellect and expertise or to indicate the different realms of science that analyze behavior at each of these levels. Instead, it is to indicate that at each of these stages the nature of a behavior is multifactorial. It is dependent upon a confluence of inborn and environmental factors as well as the inborn and environmental factors influencing the behavior at every other stage. In other words, with brains and behavior, we deal with dazzling, stupefying networks of complexity to which science has yet to catch up.

Examples of this complexity emerge in Sapolsky’s coverage of genome-wide association studies (GWAS): “these fishing expeditions show why we are so ignorant about the genetics of behavior. Consider a classic GWAS that looked for genes related to height […] Hundreds of genetic variants were implicated in regulating height […]. [M]eanwhile, we are plugging away, trying to understand interactions of two genes at a time” (262-64).

No single discipline in science can tell us what determines a behavior. “These terms mean different things for scientists living inside different disciplines” (16). This means any genuinely causal explanation of a behavior that incorporates biology must be multifactorial, which Sapolsky demonstrates in his discussion of multifactorial analytic application to criminal justice (602). The potential of such analysis is massive. First, it reorients our understanding of what can be subject to deterministic analysis, which rescues complex systems from interpretation as chaos (from which emerges our intuitions of free will): “A cloud may be less tangible than a brick, but it’s constructed with the same rules about how atoms interact” (188).

More importantly, multifactorial understanding of biology’s causal effects on behavior reorients our ethics with the potential to revolutionize how we treat our own minds and judge the acts of others: “A child suffers malnutrition and, as an adult, has poor cognitive skills. That’s easy to frame biologically—malnutrition impairs brain development. Alternatively, a child is raised by cold, inexpressive parents and, as an adult, feels unlovable […] It may be less convenient to articulate the former biologically than the latter […] But biology mediates both links” (188). In the case that this child committed a criminal act, leading our social systems to punish them, we must remember what scientific advancements over the last few centuries have shown us, which is that “people in the future will look back at us as we do at purveyors of leeches and bloodletting […]. My God, the things they didn’t know then. The harm that they did” (608).