tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-206920412024-03-07T19:04:52.237+00:00The Proper Study Of MankindA blog on evolution, philosophy and human natureDan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-22762832581177064212010-06-29T14:27:00.007+00:002010-06-29T15:07:05.032+00:00Thoughts on the Templeton FoundationIt’s no secret that many atheists don’t much like the <a href="http://www.templeton.org/" target="thirdparty">John Templeton Foundation</a> (hereafter just ‘Templeton’), and have a pretty low opinion of people who accept Templeton funding and financial support. This theme cropped up in two recent blog posts – one by Jerry Coyne, the other by PZ Myers – and I want to make a few comments about both.<br /><br /><a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/accommodationist-or-faitheist-templeton-will-pay-you-big/" target="thirdparty">Coyne’s post</a> was a response to a new website to be launched by Templeton, Big Questions Online. Coyne starts in characteristic style:<br /><blockquote>“Are you one of those indigent freelance writers, scrabbling hard to earn a pittance? Sick of magazines and newspapers that pay you jack? Well, your troubles are over—at least if you’re willing to churn out accommodationist pap. The John Templeton Foundation, through its <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/rod-dreher-and-the-templeton-bribe/" target="thirdparty">credential-bending director of publications Rod Dreher</a>, has announced that, if you’re willing to toe the party line, Templeton has big simoleons for writers.”</blockquote>The details of the ‘pap’ writers will have to produce <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/06/going-broke-as-an-op-ed-writer.html" target="thirdparty">are provided by Dreher</a>:<br /><blockquote>“[T]he Web publication the John Templeton Foundation will soon launch, Big Questions Online, will be paying good money for essays. We're interested in smart, insightful pieces on science, religion, markets, morals, and any combination of the four.”</blockquote><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/06/new_agnostics_or_same_old_inef.php" target="thirdparty">Myers’ post</a> is a long response to an <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/pagenum/all/#p2" target="thirdparty">essay by Ron Rosenbaum</a>, who was one of this year’s <a href="http://www.templeton-cambridge.org/" target="thirdparty">Templeton Science and Religion Journalism Fellows</a>. At the end, Myers writes:<br /><blockquote>“I'm not going to try to take apart every word in Rosenbaum's disjointed agglomeration of poorly thought out nonsense. But I will leave you with one little phrase from the article that tells you everything you need to know: “Having recently spent two weeks in Cambridge (the one in the United Kingdom) on a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship…” Goodnight, Ron Rosenbaum.”</blockquote>I don’t think I’m misreading Myers’ comment when I say that the implication is that anyone who has anything to do with Templeton is inherently untrustworthy (intellectually) and their views can be dismissed simply by virtue of that association.<br /><br />Coyne’s short post admits of two possible readings. On one, he could be taken to be saying that writing about science, religion, markets or morals is to inevitably churn out accommodationist pap (otherwise it doesn’t make sense to cite the scope of the articles Templeton are interested in as evidence that putative contributors will be required to do so). But that would be crazy talk. <a href="http://www.psych.ubc.ca/%7Ehenrich/home.html" target="thirdparty">Joseph Henrich</a>, for example, is one of the world’s leading anthropologists, and uses a combination of ethnographic observation, mathematical modelling and experimentation to tease apart the basic factors shaping human behaviour (I haven’t done justice to his research with this summary; <a href="http://www.psych.ubc.ca/%7Ehenrich/home.html" target="thirdparty">check his website out for more details</a>).<br /><br />A recent paper of Henrich and colleagues, published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Science</span>, was entitled, ‘<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/327/5972/1480?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=henrich+religion+fairness&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT" target="thirdparty">Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment</a>’. The abstract reads as follows:<br /><blockquote>Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.</blockquote>Is this accommodationist pap, junk research that is of no interest to anyone but the devout wishing to reconcile science with religion? Of course not. Would I be producing worthless accommodationist garbage if I wrote a story about this sort of work for, say, <span style="font-style: italic;">Science </span>or <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature</span>? Again, of course not. So would it automatically become accommodationist pap if I wrote exactly the same thing for Big Questions Online? And what does writing about science, religion, markets and morals have to do with arguments about accommodationism? Indeed, Coyne seems to have moved away from principled arguments about accommodationism to simply smearing everything and anyone that has anything to do with Templeton (though as we’ll see below, his targeting of people is actually a bit selective). And if writing about science, religion, markets and morals – even for Templeton – is not intrinsically pap-worthy, then why does Coyne say, in response to calls for essays on these topics, that writers must be willing to “churn out accommodationist pap” or be “willing to toe the party line”? And finally, just what is the Templeton party line when it comes to science, religion, markets and morals? I’m genuinely interested to hear answers to these reasonable questions.<br /><br />Of course, the real issue here is the Templeton Foundation – what it does, and what it’s about. The big sticking point, for writers such as Coyne and Myers, seems to be not merely the fact that many folk at Templeton hold religious beliefs, but that they argue for a compatibility between science and religion that Coyne, Myers and many others do not accept*. Richard Dawkins has criticised the organisation for trying to ride on the coat-tails of science, but I get the impression that the issue is really much deeper: that Templeton poses a threat to the conduct of science and the integrity of researchers who benefit from their funding. On the <span style="font-style: italic;">Edge </span>website, <a href="http://www.edge.org/discourse/templeton_index.html" target="thirdparty">Coyne wrote</a>:<br /><blockquote>I absolutely agree ... that the Templeton Foundation corrupts science. It does this in two ways. First, it involves us in a dialogue that is designed to have a predetermined result: the reconciliation of science and religion. But when doing our own research, we are not committed to a specific outcome. Thus, if you're one of the many scientists who doesn't think that such a reconciliation is possible — at least not without mendacity, self-delusion, or cognitive dissonance — then it is unethical to take money from the Foundation. That is like taking money to attend a conference aimed at reconciling evolution with Intelligent Design, even if you do not think that they're compatible. (IDers think that they are.)<br /><br />Second, it leads, as George Johnson has noted, to the appearance of a conflict of interest, even if the beneficiary is convinced that none exists. Even if a US Senator is predetermined by his own opinions to vote in favor of, say, drilling for oil in Alaska, it is nevertheless illegal and unethical for him to take personal money from the oil industry, and it looks bad to take campaign money from the oil industry. Scientists should be purer than Senators because it is our business to promulgate the truth, and all we have is our reputations as unsullied truth-seekers.<br /><br />I am appalled at the Templeton Foundation dangling large sums of money in front of scientists. Why so much money? This can only serve, I think, to bend those people motivated by the prospect of gaining a million-plus dollars toward the will of the Foundation.</blockquote>You’d have to be a bit of a moron to fail to see why someone might hold these concerns. But I think they may be a bit over-blown, and I’ll try to explain why. The first point, that anyone who doesn’t believe in a fundamental compatibility of scientific knowledge and religious belief is behaving unethically if they accept money from the Templeton, seems to go a bit far, for a number of reasons.<br /><br />First, not everyone who receives Templeton funding does so in relation to work that is aimed at establishing this compatibility. <a href="http://people.virginia.edu/%7Ejdh6n/" target="thirdparty">Jonathan Haidt</a> of the University of Virginia, for instance, is a leading social and cultural psychologist, and one of his research interests is in the long-neglected positive emotions. Hadit has received Templeton funding into positive psychology, but the published work that has arisen from this has nothing to do with reconciling science and religion, or even arguing for accommodationism.<br /><br />Second, even if you disagree with Templeton about accommodationism or the fundamental harmony between science and religion, it does not strike me as unethical to work with Templeton. Here’s a parallel. Jerry Coyne, like me, has written for <span style="font-style: italic;">Science </span>magazine – and the official line of its publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is accommodationist. Yet that didn’t prevent either Coyne or me for writing for them, and quite rightly. The purist attitude evident in refusing to accept money from someone with whom you do not entirely agree with is commendable to a degree, but I think it needs to be kept in perspective. I wouldn’t write for a racist publication or organisation, for instance – my ethical stance against racism would make me an unethical hypocrite if I did. Yet does it follow from that example that I shouldn’t write for anyone with whom I disagree on some point, whether it be foreign policy or domestic politics? Obviously not, otherwise I wouldn’t write for anybody. Similarly, if you only maintained friendships with people with whom you agreed 100%, you’d probably be pretty lonely.<br /><br />So it clearly matters what the disagreement is about. A disagreement about whether some races are inherently superior to others is very deep moral disagreement, one that cannot be glossed over while conversation focuses on other things. But is a disagreement of whether science and religion can be reconciled a similarly profound moral issue, as opposed to an intellectual/epistemological issue? Is it the case that if someone believes in accommodationism, and you don’t, then that person’s is, like the racist, beyond the moral pale, and should therefore be avoided? This seems a little hard to swallow, but I’d be interested in arguments to show I’m wrong.<br /><br />Coyne’s second point, that accepting Templeton funding creates the perception of conflict of interests, even where none really exists, also seems to be less significant in practice. In the case of the oil company and the senator, the oil company wants to pursue drilling and the senator is advocating drilling. But this one-to-one mapping of interests is not always, or perhaps even frequently, evident when it comes to Templeton funding: it’s not like Templeton has a single goal of arguing for accommodationism and only funds people who argue likewise. Haidt’s work on the positive emotions, for instance, is not a call for accommodationism, nor is it offered as proof of “spiritual realities” – it’s just basic psychological research.<br /><br />The final point, about the temptations created by the prospect of large sums of money, calls into question the integrity of those who accept it. Yet I’m not really sure that Coyne or Myers want to go on the record and question the research and motivations of people such as Haidt, or <a href="http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/dkeltner.html" target="thirdparty">Dacher Keltner</a> (another researcher in positive psychology), or evolutionary biologist <a href="http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/" target="thirdparty">David Sloan Wilson</a> who have received Templeton funding – or researchers such as <a href="http://people.umass.edu/gintis/" target="thirdparty">Herb Gintis</a> (a leading game theorist and behavioural economist) and <a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/%7Egazzanig/" target="thirdparty">Michael Gazzaniga</a> (one of the world’s most famous neuroscientists), who have participated in Templeton projects. (I accept that the quality of their work and their fame is no guarantee that they do not bend their views to get Templeton money, or that they don’t hold bizarre views in other domains, but I’ve seen no evidence to support either assertion.) Of course, if Templeton was an inherently immoral organisation, then there would be cause for censure of these academics – but what evidence supports such an argument?<br /><br />I want to return to the issue of the scope of Templeton’s funding interests, which I’ve already suggested go beyond simply giving people money to spout an accommodationist position. The organisation funds research into many areas that are part of standard academic research. For instance, the highly respected evolutionary biologist <a href="http://www.yale.edu/eeb/wagner/" target="thirdparty">Gunter Wagner</a> of Yale University was awarded a grant to study “<a href="http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grants/genetics-and-the-origin-of-organismal-complexity" target="thirdparty">genetics and the origins of organismal complexity</a>” (a topic that should be right up Myers’ and Coyne’s street – and mine too, as you can see in <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627661.400-evolvability-how-to-cash-in-on-the-genetic-lottery.html?full=true" target="thirdparty">this article</a>). This sort of work is essential for understanding the topic of ‘evolvability’, a central issue in evolutionary-developmental biology. Wagner’s published work – which I heartily commend to you – has nothing to do with promoting a reconciliation between science and religion. It’s just good science, and we should be grateful that it’s being funded. Would Coyne be prepared to say that Wagner (or Haidt, or Keltner) has in some way acted unethically or been corrupted by accepting this grant? Has science lost out, or gained, by the availability of Templeton funding in this case? And if this case is beyond reproach, then why the blanket dismissal and ridicule of all Templeton-related activities? What about behavioural geneticist <a href="http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/staff/profile/default.aspx?go=10628" target="thirdparty">Robert Plomin</a> of Kings College London <a href="http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grants/the-genetics-of-high-cognitive-abilities" target="thirdparty">receiving money to look into the genetics of high cognitive abilities</a>? Or <a href="http://www.cgu.edu/pages/473.asp" target="thirdparty">Paul Zak</a> <a href="http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grants/oxytocin-and-the-neurobiology-of-human-virtues-resilience-generosity-and-compass" target="thirdparty">receiving funding to study the effects of oxytocin on social behaviour</a>? Are all these researchers obligated to churn out accommodationist pap because they’ve received money from Templeton? And if not, then why does that logic apply to writers contributing to the Big Questions Online?<br /><br />So I come back to the starting point. Why does Coyne suggest that doing anything related to the Templeton’s activities automatically imply that you have to write accommodationist pap, or toe a part line? Why does Myers think that the mere fact that someone has had something to do with Templeton mean that they can be written off? I understand that neither of these writers likes the idea of science and religion being compatible in a deep sense (i.e., not just that one mind can hold both scientific and religious beliefs), but I struggle to see how this translates into such vitriol against Templeton and its affiliates: remember, Coyne described the Templeton Fellowships as a "<a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/the-templeton-bribe/" target="thirdparty">bribe</a>" (Coyne did later say he didn’t really mean bribe – though it’s it not quite clear what he meant other than to smear the organisation), and Russell Blackford called Chris Mooney a "<a href="http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/02/27/the-rumors-of-my-fellowship-have-been-greatly-accurate/#comment-51126" target="thirdparty">disgusting traitor</a>" for accepting one such Fellowship.<br /><br />I must be missing something. Perhaps Coyne and Myers will suggest I’m a mental defective who simply can’t see what’s really going on. Or perhaps they know things I don’t about how corrupting Templeton is on researchers, writers and science at large. I hope, however, that if they reply, they can refrain from the obvious temptation to attack me at my deepest integrity by suggesting that I’m simply auditioning for Templeton money. We need the debates to get beyond the ad hominems.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*I’m also an atheist who doesn’t believe that science and religion are fundamentally compatible: if you accept that the way we find out about the world is through observation and experiment, and that explanations must be couched in naturalistic terms that can be assessed empirically, then faith, revelation and authority seem to be off the cards. But it doesn’t follow from this position that I should be hostile to the work of Templeton, the researchers it funds, or the writers it supports.</span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-4072750480992976452010-06-24T17:33:00.002+00:002010-06-24T17:40:58.333+00:00The Evolution of Biological Innovation<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV9gqCCF-gZ0bZNkp4e_inyRsbjaDSn8GeF_BzdMJcKS3EczmutkaG6wb4EWyn5pheBF1phwX_J8OQtQyZRX09vjGeBQXH4RhzP0b2BctGUdfFOqgf4OwYFcRC5bypfoZaKZw97g/s1600/de-evolution-of-man-shirt.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV9gqCCF-gZ0bZNkp4e_inyRsbjaDSn8GeF_BzdMJcKS3EczmutkaG6wb4EWyn5pheBF1phwX_J8OQtQyZRX09vjGeBQXH4RhzP0b2BctGUdfFOqgf4OwYFcRC5bypfoZaKZw97g/s320/de-evolution-of-man-shirt.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5486396495912084658" /></a><br />The theory evolution by natural selection, boiled down to its bare bones, is pretty simple. All it requires is that a few conditions be met among a population of animals or plants (or any other organism for that matter): competition for resources; variation in survival and reproductive success; and a system of heredity that ensures that some of this variation is passed on from generation to generation. We now know what Darwin didn’t, that genes underlie the transmission of much of the variation seen among organisms that affects how well they thrive, and whether they pass on their genes or not.<br /><br />And so natural selection can be cast as an essentially algorithmic process: when there is genetic variation in a population of organisms, and some of this variation affects how well they get on in life, the population will evolve. As new genetic variants with beneficial effects arise, their bearers will do better, pass more copies of these genes on, and after a while most or all members of the population will carry the new genetic variant and its associated benefits.<br /><br />So when thinking about if and when a population will evolve, genetic variation is a crucial issue. If there is none, then there is now raw material for natural selection to work on. Although there may be variation in the outward form or behaviour of the individuals in the population, and some of this may affect whether they stay alive and fecund, it won’t be passed on to future generations — thus short-circuiting the cumulative power of natural selection.<br /><br />So the extent of genetic variation in a species or population is a crucial determinant of whether it will evolve, and how it will respond to new selective pressures. To capture this in a word, we might say that genetic variation drives the ‘evolvability’ of a species of population.<br /><br />‘Evolvability’ was coined, perhaps surprisingly, as recently as 1987, by Richard Dawkins, the arch-phrasemaker who also brought us the ‘selfish gene’, ‘extended phenotypes’ and ‘memes’. And while it has sometimes been used to reflect the capacity for evolutionary change under the pressures of natural selection described above, it is nowadays more commonly used to mean something more subtle, perhaps more fundamental.<br /><br />Evolvability, in its modern sense, generally refers to the capacity for genetic changes to produce adaptive changes in how organisms are built and behave — their phenotypes, in the biologists’ lexicon. The issue here is not the extent of genetic variation per se, but how this genetic variation maps onto phenotypic variation — that is, whether genetic variants produce phenotypic variants that are beneficial and can be passed on to offspring. This is the key to evolutionary innovation, and the emergence of new organismal designs. So rather than focusing on how much genetic variation is knocking around, researchers interested in understanding evolvability are increasingly looking to the factors that determine the ‘genotype–phenotype map’: for it is changes in the mapping functions that determine the relevance of whatever genetic variation is present.<br /><br />This is all pretty abstract and theoretical, but I put some flesh on these ideas in a piece for New Scientist this week. It’s currently <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627661.400-evolvability-how-to-cash-in-on-the-genetic-lottery.html?full=true" target="thirdparty">available to read in all its glory here</a>. Check it out.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-47239293772966380012010-06-11T15:21:00.011+00:002010-06-11T21:52:46.011+00:00Oh what a lovely molecule!<span style="font-style: italic;">The continuing adventures with the astonishing hormone oxytocin</span><br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin" target="third_party">Oxytocin </a>is small but remarkable molecule. It clocks in at just nine amino acids — compared to 524 for our blood’s oxygen carrier, haemoglobin — yet it packs a powerful punch. And where haemoglobin is tasked only with the relatively simple job of ferrying oxygen around the blood, the effects of oxytocin reach into some the deepest recesses of the human condition.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAKWjlEL9sSgwz2VfjOxAvvcQ3MYxOEagEEF9iFcMN_leBTgf8zS4Cp1OQPlaXFnpfHkq5MQzpr9Etdzo87AVvoLbsL4BHLbBOToqSTGbs3S62LwWICxhGJhix3CYlfvCbqggAHw/s1600/oxytocin.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 183px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAKWjlEL9sSgwz2VfjOxAvvcQ3MYxOEagEEF9iFcMN_leBTgf8zS4Cp1OQPlaXFnpfHkq5MQzpr9Etdzo87AVvoLbsL4BHLbBOToqSTGbs3S62LwWICxhGJhix3CYlfvCbqggAHw/s200/oxytocin.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481540187003535938" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Oxytocin acts as both a hormone that circulates around the body and a neurotransmitter that regulates brain activity. Over the past 10 years, oxytocin has been implicated in some of the most fundamental aspects of social relationships, such as romantic love, trust and bonding: it helps create the strong bond between infants and mothers, reduces maternal stress, increases trust in economic games, and ameliorates anxiety.<br /><br />Many studies have stressed the importance of tactile contact in regulating the effects of oxytocin. Touch is an important means of social communication for many mammals, and is frequently deployed to convey emotional states, such as friendliness and anxiety. And studies on rodents have suggested that direct tactile contact is indeed essential for activating the oxytocin system.<br />Yet along with physical contact, vocalisations — such as the squeaks of mice — are also an important means of social communication in a range of mammals. And oxytocin plays a key role here, too. Mice genetically engineered to lack the oxytocin gene produce fewer social vocalisations, show profound social deficits, and have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.<br /><br />This led Leslie Seltzer, Toni Ziegler and Seth Pollak from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to wonder whether such vocalisations could boost oxytocin levels. And while rats might be quite vocal, humans have taken this skill to an extreme. So the team looked at whether human speech alone could affect oxytocin levels.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Comforting words</span><br />Seltzer and colleagues enlisted more than 60 mother-daughter pairs for their study. All daughters were prepubescent but old enough to understand the experiment, and the experiment was limited to females to ensure the greatest degree of similarity and comparability between subjects, and also to connect their results to earlier work, most of which has focused on females. To test the hypothesis that the spoken word could cause the release of oxytocin, each poor kid had to speak and solve maths puzzles in front of an audience, a task well known to induce stress and the release of cortisol.<br /><br />Then the kids were split up into three groups. One group was then reunited with their mothers for 15 minutes, who comforted them with hugs and soothing words; this comprised the ‘complete contact’ condition. Another group received a telephone call of the same length from their mothers (‘talk only’); the final third (the control group) watched an emotionally neutral film for 75 minutes (the other girls watched 60 minutes of the film after seeing or speaking with their moms, so that the effects of the film could be subtracted out of the analysis).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbdHoq2b4lBItJXYyNZbLkwQGDDpBaYxPxAWaTjgirMc-japC-m4N-IPwi7kPbIVcXsPNOdBDPZupxhurZrhbNCPg7IXcDuAZQY5ygfCXWUB0RvwTm0msl-HBM_FziC2DijV0Iw/s1600/mother-comforting-daughter.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 211px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbdHoq2b4lBItJXYyNZbLkwQGDDpBaYxPxAWaTjgirMc-japC-m4N-IPwi7kPbIVcXsPNOdBDPZupxhurZrhbNCPg7IXcDuAZQY5ygfCXWUB0RvwTm0msl-HBM_FziC2DijV0Iw/s320/mother-comforting-daughter.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481540604231240274" border="0" /></a>Their results — <a href="http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/05/06/rspb.2010.0567.abstract" target="third_party">reported a few weeks back in <span style="font-style: italic;">Proceedings of the Royal Society B</span> </a>— support British Telecom’s slogan from the 1990s that “It’s good to talk”. In all the stressed-out kids, cortisol levels spiked, as to be expected. Yet in both the complete-contact and talk-only groups, cortisol levels returned to normal more rapidly than in controls. This was accompanied, in the experimental groups, with elevated urinary levels of oxytocin, whereas controls showed no rise in the hormone. And although the magnitude of these effects was greater with complete contact compared with a call alone, cortisol levels in both groups were statistically indistinguishable after an hour. In the absence of a comforting hug, a few words of support may do the trick in soothing a stressed-out soul.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">To tend and defend</span><br />Another study on oxytocin, <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5984/1408" target="third_party">published in today’s issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Science</span></a>, explores its effects in males — and not as an anti-stress hormone but as the source of social solidarity. Humans are the social species par excellence. Yes, ants and bees and many other species in huge groups, but none cooperates with genetically unrelated individuals to the same extent as humans. This capacity for large-scale cooperation, and the altruism it is built on, is the key to the global success of humans over the past 50,000 years.<br /><br />Yet altruism isn’t cast about indiscriminately. It is directed more towards members of variously defined in-groups (only a small percentage of whom will be relatives), and selectively withdrawn from perceived out-groups. This ‘parochial altruism’ may have emerged through the process of cultural group selection, in which groups fostering prosocial norms towards the rest of our group, and antagonism towards out-groups, led to greater success in inter-group competition.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidHbiuprRn8YT65MuTK1NP19Yh-7hYmHMPQV-23iFHDlC1Zcz46iBoNv8u7f3AZEQzY5a2L5TmgPNZvbBjOjjCWjfdG-Fikw1tA9qCox8WlZUXfBSRIJYxfVf8mPPfZ4anJ6wSWg/s1600/The+Wanderers.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 215px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidHbiuprRn8YT65MuTK1NP19Yh-7hYmHMPQV-23iFHDlC1Zcz46iBoNv8u7f3AZEQzY5a2L5TmgPNZvbBjOjjCWjfdG-Fikw1tA9qCox8WlZUXfBSRIJYxfVf8mPPfZ4anJ6wSWg/s320/The+Wanderers.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481541028995122802" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Such cultural selection can also have effects on biology — a phenomenon biologists call gene–culture co-evolution. As famous example is dairy farming: among those populations that picked up the cultural habit of keeping cattle and using their milk, genes for digesting lactose beyond childhood became more valuable and spread, so we now see high levels of lactose tolerance in societies with a history of dairy farming, and low levels elsewhere. In the case of altruism, in-group amity and out-group enmity, a cultural milieu favouring in-group love could have placed a premium on biological mechanisms that promote this feeling.<br /><br />So Cartsen De Dreu and colleagues decided to see whether oxytocin played any role in modulating parochial altruism. Their experiments, like so may that investigate altruism and inter-group cooperative dynamics, used simple economic games — and in this case, only males were included. The games they played went as follows. Each player was assigned to a three-person group (their in-group), which was paired up with another three-person group (the out-group). Each player was given 10 Euros, which they could either keep to themselves, or contribute to one of two common pools — a ‘within group’ pool and a ‘between group’ pool — after which the pooled money was to be split among members of each group.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG_NtiapoXzc6KPQZNhKdaPuaQAbblYujkaHhLt_pmnZaRcJmTjyol-CkBPhjQWr9Unp8vIyxyhZotUxyuQFzzgnKeE9HP8LTMtuqTlOZfrIit9dFQO0OSUkNzbBZxjSSgJcCSGQ/s1600/The+Fordham+Baldies.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 215px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG_NtiapoXzc6KPQZNhKdaPuaQAbblYujkaHhLt_pmnZaRcJmTjyol-CkBPhjQWr9Unp8vIyxyhZotUxyuQFzzgnKeE9HP8LTMtuqTlOZfrIit9dFQO0OSUkNzbBZxjSSgJcCSGQ/s320/The+Fordham+Baldies.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481541029424368850" border="0" /></a>These allocation options came with different economic payoffs for the parties involved. For every Euro contributed to the within-group pool, an additional 50 cents were given to each member of the player’s in-group, and so contributions to this pool measured ‘in-group love’ (a purely selfish player would keep all their money to themselves while hoping to free-ride on the contributions of their group members, of which they would get a share when the post was divvied up). Paying into the between-group pool also generated an extra 50 cents for each fellow in-group member, while also decreasing the money in the out-group by 50 cents per player, and so provided a measure of out-group hate.<br /><br />Before playing this game, some participants received a shot of oxytocin, administered as a nasal spray. (This method has been used in previous studies, where it was shown to increase feelings of trust.) This hormonal boost had the effect of increasing in-group love, but had no consequences for out-group hate. 52% of players in the placebo condition behaved selfishly and did not contribute to the within-group pool, and only 20% showed in-group love. The single shot of oxytocin, however, switched this patter, and now only 17% of players acted selfishly, with 58% evincing in-group love. (Out-group haters comprised 28% of players in the placebo condition, and 25% in the oxytocin arm.) This warm glow of in-group love also moved those who scored more highly as selfish on questionnaires to contribute more to the in-group, so it’s the case that only those primed to cooperate respond to oxytocin in this way.<br /><br />Other experiments suggest that the in-group love is driven less by hatred of the out-group and more by a desires to protect the in-group. Players played similar economic games, but this time the rules were manipulated so that in some conditions players could do particularly well by cooperating with their teammates, which is this case meant contributing a decent share of their endowment (this was the ‘greed’ situation). At the same time, the rules also allowed for the possibility that players would do particularly badly if they failed to work together cooperatively, while the out-group would gain a significant edge (the ‘fear’ condition). So some games were in greed and fear, other high in one and not the other, and some low in both. This enabled the effects of greed and fear on cooperation, and this interacted with oxytocin.<br /><br />As expected, those given oxytocin showed more in-group love than those receiving placebo. But this effect was greatest when players were in a high fear situation — that is, when the possibility that their group would lose out heavily was salient. Meanwhile, no effect of greed was seen.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1QHZyrtBslE2T2nfMJeHk_YEjik3TP8_FigGKtdspyfuEx2j_Pu4GVZ4sk3tW-7l3ehZ1phJy1gje0V3-GVmL4t4sTD3cyjJzbTZMFxr3wnbe45e8eQfbgF83b1J1wHSbSMsMw/s1600/Baseball+Fury.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 234px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1QHZyrtBslE2T2nfMJeHk_YEjik3TP8_FigGKtdspyfuEx2j_Pu4GVZ4sk3tW-7l3ehZ1phJy1gje0V3-GVmL4t4sTD3cyjJzbTZMFxr3wnbe45e8eQfbgF83b1J1wHSbSMsMw/s320/Baseball+Fury.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481541035731662354" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It needn’t have been this way. Parochial altruism could promote in-group love and, simultaneously, fuel aggression towards out-groups. But in these experiments at least, parochial altruism emerged as a ‘tend and defend’ philosophy: look after your own and protect them, but don’t go all out to get at out-groups. And as social philosophies go, it’s not the worst starting point in the world.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-52896183726686293322010-03-04T14:17:00.006+00:002010-03-05T12:43:03.375+00:00Torture, Inc.The story of how torture became part of standard operating practice at Guantanamo Bay is by now <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Torture-Team-Uncovering-Crimes-Land/dp/0141031328/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267710636&sr=1-2" target="third_party">widely known</a> (Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic has written extensively, and with great sense, about all these issues; a good place to start is with <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/10/dear-president-bush/7663/" target="third_party">this open letter to George Bush</a>). Details of the abuses meteed out to detainees such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_al-Kahtani" target="third_party">Mohamed al-Kahtani</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Sheikh_Mohammed" target="third_party">Khalid Sheikh Mohammed</a>, the self-described mastermind of 9/11, are now in the public domain, and they make for grim reading. For months on end, Al-Katani endured <a href="http://www.time.com/time/2006/log/log.pdf" target="third_party">a daily regime</a> of four hours interrupted sleep, blaring music, stress positions, extremes of hot and cold, and an imaginative variety of humiliations and degradations, including a puppet show put on for his birthday in which he was depicted engaging in sexual acts with Osama Bin Laden. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, among other things, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=1" target="third_party">waterboarded more than 180 times in a single month</a>.<br /><br />In the case of al-Katani, some people have asked whether his treatment really amounts to torture — after all, he wasn’t electrocuted, he didn’t have his teeth pulled out or needles inserted under his finger nails. As one interrogator’s motto has it, “No blood, no foul”. Doubts have also been expressed as to whether waterboarding qualifies as a torture – though some of those who have voiced this doubt have revised their opinion after putting their money where their mouth is and voluntarily submitting to the procedure. What from a distance seems to be merely an unpleasant yet controlled experience is unbearably distressing when you’re strapped down with a towel over your face and water being poured onto that — as <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808" target="third_party">Christopher Hitchens will tell you</a>.<br /><br />Among all the moral and legal debates over the use of coercive interrogation techniques, and whether they add up to torture, the contribution of science has been overlooked. Yet psychologists and neuroscientists have much to say about the effect of various forms of ill-treatment, including those we recognise as obvious physical torture. I write about some of this work in a feature article in this week’s New Scientist magazine, which you can <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527501.400-beyond-torture-the-future-of-interrogation.html?full=true" target="third_party">check here</a>, along with an <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527502.300-where-coercion-has-failed-why-not-try-persuasion.html" target="third_party">associated editorial</a>.<br /><br />The long and short of this research is that a variety of psychological manipulations and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_Against_Torture" target="third_party">CIDT</a>) have similar, or worse, long-term effects on mental health as physical torture. If the immorality of torture depends on the consequences is has for human well-being, then there’s little scientific support to distinguish between torture proper and more justifiable, and less morally abhorent, forms of ‘torture-lite’ or ‘no-touch torture’ captured under the CIDT rubric.<br /><br />There has also been an historical lack of scientific input about how to go about interrogations. Like advertising, interrogation has been touted as more of an art than a science (though social psychology would reject both of these diagnoses). Interrogation techniques have often developed in light of anecdotal evidence and have not been subject to scientific scrutiny.<br /><br />Take the roster of techniques listed in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_2-22.3_Human_Intelligence_Collector_Operations" target="third_party">Army Field Manual</a>. These are supposed, when administered according the Army’s guidelines, to be practically, legally and morally sound ways to get information out of detainees (though Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of a former interrogator in Iraq, suggest that there are in fact <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/opinion/21alexander.html" target="third_party">loopholes that would permit some inhumane treatments</a>). Leaving aside the legal and moral issues for a moment, we can ask, “On what basis do we have reason to think that these techniques work?”.<br /><br />Very little, it turns out. Colonel <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Kleinman" target="third_party">Steven Kleinman</a> — an officer in the US Air Force Reserve, interrogation trainer and an outspoken advocate of interrogation reform — says that “the principles, strategies, and methods set forth in the Army Field Manual on interrogation have never been systematically and objectively reviewed for their efficacy” (personal communication). As such, Kleinman - who has served as an interrogator in three military campaigns (Operations Just Cause, Desert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom) - argues that there is “vital need for true science to fill the massive gaps and correct the enduring myths/misunderstandings that surround the art of interrogation”. To address this shortcoming, Kleinman, working with an experimental psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist, has reviewed these techniques in a paper to be published in the Defense Intelligence Journal. In short, they argue that “much of the material in the field manual lacks scientific support and, in some cases, may actually be counterproductive”:<br /><blockquote>“An example of the former is the assertion that capture shock presents an ideal moment to question a prisoner, allegedly because the trauma of capture will cause them to be less security conscious. Science demonstrates that people experiencing such trauma have difficulty in attending to questions or directions and often provide thoughtless answers. In addition, their ability to recall events accurately is severely diminished. As for the latter, the use of the approach known as Pride and Ego-Down (essentially belittling the prisoner in the expectation that he will answer questions in order to defend himself and his ego) will likely increase resistance, especially among members of ethnic groups (where under such emotional challenges and humiliation the individual feels a stronger bond with other members of the in-group and more disconnected from — and defiant toward — members of the out-group.)”</blockquote>Such approaches are not the only ones available for carrying out interrogations, as Kleinman argues:<br /><blockquote>“We have a rich history of conducting interrogation correctly. The MIS-Y program in World War II focused on high-level German and Japanese military officers and government officials. The individuals selected to serve in this program were college educated, talented linguists, and intimately familiar with the cultural background of the prisoners they encountered. Rather than employing force, these interrogators used a host of stratagems and gambits that involved a culturally relevant relationship-building approach augmented by meticulous research that often gave the interrogator the appearance of possessing far more knowledge about the enemy than he really did. The result was a prisoner who no longer viewed the interrogator as an enemy and who was convinced that there was no need to protect information that he believed was already known to the interrogator.”</blockquote>These historical considerations, along with the near-total absence of scientific support for more coercive approaches to interrogation, have led Kleinman and others to argue for a new approach to gaining information from human sources. For instance, <a href="http://works.bepress.com/randy_borum/44/" target="third_party">in a paper</a> written with Randy Borum, a terrorism expert at the University of South Florida, and Michael Gelles, a military psychologist, Kleinman has sketched out a new paradigm for “<a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf" target="third_party">educing information</a>” from detainees, one that draws on insights from social psychology and negotiation theory — and which would mark a return to the kinds of historically successful interrogation techniques Kleinman alludes to, but this time based on real-world data of efficacy.<br /><br />Finally, Kleinman raises a number of cost-effectiveness issues that result from poor techniques for gathering intelligence information:<br /><blockquote>“If there is a bottom line, it is this: the U.S. Intelligence Community has an annual budget that exceeds $65 billion, with a substantial portion of that funding invested in research to support new generations of technical intelligence collection. At the same time, the U.S. Government has not sponsored true research into the art of interrogation since 1956 (discounting the misguided research by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s that involved drugs and hypnosis). The actual cost of a robust research agenda to develop a new generation of interrogation doctrine — one that is not only operationally effective, but also reflects the highest legal and moral traditions of the nation and is respectful of human rights —would be comparatively small (perhaps .001 percent of the annual Intelligence Community budget). The potential returns, however, could be nothing short of extraordinary. First, the small wars (e.g., counterterrorism and counterinsurgency) are intelligence-driven wars in which human intelligence — and especially interrogation — play an irreplaceable role. Research could facilitate much greater operational effectiveness and, as a result, higher quality and more timely intelligence information to drive policies and plans. Second, by refining methods toward the twin goals of both operational effectiveness AND respect for human rights, we may begin to 1) respond to the myriad challenges with far greater knowledge of the adversary and the nature of the conflict itself and 2) reverse the enduring strategic consequences of sponsoring a program that has involved the employment of coercive methods and instead begin to comport ourselves in a manner more consistent of our self image as a nation of laws and champion of human rights.”</blockquote>All of which suggests that you don’t have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to oppose abusive treatment of terrorist suspects or insurgents, though a concern for basic moral standards will augment your case. A simple concern for national security, and a desire to spend money effectively in combating future terrorist attacks and, gets you to the same destination.<br /><br />(Many thanks to Col. Kleinman for providing these illuminating comments, and, more importantly, for his continued role in trying to reform current interrogation practices.)Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-80063740932514264102009-08-09T11:26:00.002+00:002009-08-09T11:30:21.097+00:00Is belief all it’s cracked up to be?The endless debates and arguments sparked off in recent years by the phenomenal success of books by the New Atheists — an irritating term to describe writers such as Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens — have a number of strands that are not always clearly disentangled. One thread of criticism, developed by writers such as Karen Armstrong, is that these authors have a childish, not to mention foolish, obsession with the beliefs of religious people. For Armstrong, this mistake finds a parallel in the obsessive defence of specific beliefs and doctrines by followers of religious traditions. The problem, in short, is that religion should not really be construed as a matter of belief, but should be seen as a form of practical knowledge, something you do rather than think. I’ve written a short piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free section <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/09/religion-armstrong-atheism" target="third_party">following up the implications of this recommendation</a>.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-3777612229962327862009-03-01T12:41:00.010+00:002009-03-01T13:25:59.782+00:00The evolution of disgust<span style="font-style: italic;">New reseaerch illuminates the path from "oral won't" to "moral don't".</span><br /><br />Confronted with the worst excesses of human wickedness and moral depravity, we’re apt to respond not just with condemnation, but with deep and visceral revulsion. And the daily news provides all too many opportunities to observe the baseness of our fellow humans. When the horrendously brutal details of the short life of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Baby_P" target="third_party">Baby P</a> came to light last November, my mind struggled to understand not only how the child protection services at Haringey Council could have missed the abuse this poor child continuously suffered, despite 50 visits to his home over 2 years, but also how on earth anyone could possibly mete out such treatment to a defenceless baby (hardly an unusual thought, I appreciate). It’s incomprehensible, and revolting.<br /><br />In such cases, our moral abhorrence or disgust is patently justified. Indeed, you’d suspect that anyone lacking such feelings on hearing this tragic story had a moral screw loose. More generally, moral revulsion has been advocated as a guide to moral judgment. On this view, there is wisdom in repugnance, which may express an intuitive understanding of actiosn, events and situations that the rational mind can’t fathom [1].<br /><br />But moral disgust is a complex emotion. Perhaps more than any other, it is easily put to thoroughly immoral ends. Just as we physically push away disgusting food or objects in front of us, we emotionally and socially distance ourselves from those we view as disgusting. Research shows that people dehumanise extreme out-group members, such as vagrants, and are primarily driven by disgust when they do so [2]. Portraying social or ethnic groups in disgusting terms — as cockroaches or rats or even just as fat, greedy and greasy humans — is a frequent prelude to pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide [3]. Disgust has driven attitudes to interracial sex, and today is a still a potent force in shaping attitudes to gay sex, with knock-on effects on views about gay rights, particularly the right to marry [4].<br /><br />Far from being an infallible or even reliable moral light by which to find our way, moral disgust is frequently the source of bias, prejudice and hostility. The disgusting are seen as less than human, and treated accordingly (and as history reminds us, people are all too willing to make people appear disgusting by forcing them to live in filthy, squalid, humiliating conditions so as to justify the mistreatment they will subsequently face).<br /><br />The complexity of disgust as a social and moral emotion is reflected in its development, both through evolution and in individual development. Historically and developmentally, moral disgust follows on the coat-tails of core disgust – the revulsion experienced when you seen bodily fluids, a rotting carcass or dog shit on your shoe (or on the tyres of your bike, as is more often the case for me). And core disgust is itself a cognitively complex emotion.<br /><br />For a start, it is more than just distaste or a felling of aversion towards something. As <a href="http://www.psych.upenn.edu/%7Erozin/" target="third_party">Paul Rozin</a>, one of the pioneers of research into disgust, points out, disgust is a much more cognitive and emotional reaction that simple distaste, and draws on an understanding what food is and where it comes from [5]. Animals dislike and avoid certain tastes, but don’t qualify as having a genuine disgust response. This claim needs a bit of unpacking. Imagine I show you a sterilised cock-roach, and then dip it in a glass of lemonade using clean tongs. Would you sip the drink? Probably not, even if you’re thirsty. The drink will seem contaminated, and disgusting.<br /><br />The notion of contamination, which is a complex cognitive evaluation, is an important part of the human disgust reaction, and is clearly more than just distaste. The lemonade, after all, will taste exactly the same after the cockroach dipping (that is, delicious — at least for those who, like me, have a sweet tooth). It will even be safe. But the feeling of aversion directed at the cockroach gets transferred to the harmless drink (similarly, people are often reluctant to eat chocolates shaped like turds). This doesn’t happen among other animals, nor in children under 5 to 7 years of age.<br /><br />Similar notions of contamination and transference as found in core disgust (indeed, are hallmarks of a genuine disgust response) have also been found in the moral domain. Just as we are repulsed by the prospect of consuming foods or drinks contaminated by elicitors of core disgust, we also fear moral contamination. Studies show that people feel a bit queasy about the idea of putting on a sweater worn by Hitler (even if carefully laundered). What’s more, being forced to recall our own moral misdemeanours produces an urge to physically cleanse ourselves in an attempt to wash away the moral stain on our character.<br /><br />Some researchers have suggested that much talk of moral disgust is merely metaphorical. There is general agreement that moral judgments related to actions that involve elicitors of core disgust — faeces, bodily fluids and offices, and certain forms of bodily contact — have a strong disgust element driving them. (It’s little wonder that people get so vexed about sexual morality.) But when we say we’re disgusted by the venality and irresponsibility of investment bankers, are we really experiencing a visceral feeling of revulsion, or just using a verbal tag to show off our disapprobation of their actions?<br /><br />There are clues that this isn’t so, at least in some cases. Studies such as those on Hitler’s sweater provide one reason to doubt the metaphor hypothesis. If disgust and the associated ideas of moral contamination are just metaphors, why do people object to donning Hilter’s now-clean sweater? There is also some evidence that core disgust and moral disgust elicit similar physiological responses. Whereas anger tends to cause the heart rate beat faster, disgust — prompted by looking at a gory image, say — makes it drop. So what happens when people view an extreme moral out group, like the Nazis? Does their bodily response suggest that they are getting mad, or feeling revolted?<br /><br /><a href="http://people.virginia.edu/%7Ejdh6n/" targte="third_party">Jonathan Haidt</a>, who has worked with Rozin and built on his ideas, paired up with graduate student <a href="http://people.virginia.edu/%7Egds6d/" target="third_party">Gary Sherman</a> to address this question, using a variety of nasty video clips, as well footage of Nazi rallies, which subjects viewed while their bodily reactions where monitored [6]. Haidt and Sherman found that not only did people report being disgusted by the Nazis, their heart rates also told the same story. Strikingly, those who heart rates dropped the most also reported greater clenching of the throat, another disgust-related muscular response. (Brain-imaging studies also suggest that similar brain regions subserve both core and moral disgust.)<br /><br />All of which leads to the following evolutionary and developmental scenario for the emergence of moral disgust. Initially, animals evolved a distaste response that guided them away from poisonous or otherwise harmful foodstuffs. In humans, this distaste foundation was built upon to create the more complex and cognitively demanding ‘core disgust’ domain, whose primary elicitors are things that practically all of us find totally gross (shit, piss, puke, snot, puss – I use these decidedly non-euphemistic terms to fire up your disgust response!). Combine this with the notion of contamination and the transference of bad properties of one type of object or matter to another, and now history begins to count: in assessing whether to eat or drink something, it isn’t just a case of whether it looks nice or smells fresh; its provenance matters, as does its history of contact with other disgusting things (this, lamentably, can even include people).<br /><br />This core disgust system took a long while to evolve, and takes time to emerge through child development. But once in place, it has been co-opted by our social and moral psychology to serve new ends — principally to distance ourselves from the morally odious. Whereas core disgust originally protected the body against oral incorporation of dangerous things, the expanded concept of moral disgust enables us to protect our moral selves, at the levels of individuals and communities, from moral contamination and corruption. As Haidt frames it, the guardian of the body has taken on a new role as a guardian of the purity of our souls.<br /><br />The link between the two domains, the oral and the moral, is captured in colloquialisms expressing condemnation of moral transgressions, like “His behaviour left a bad taste in my mouth”. Of course, this isn’t a literal claim, but what underlies it? The idea of an evolutionary and developmental trajectory from “oral won’t” to “moral don’t” has recently been tested by psychologist Hannah Chapman and colleagues at the University of Toronto, who argue that disgust related to oral incorporation is indeed similar to that experienced during moral judgement [7].<br /><br />In a paper just published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Science</span>, Chapman <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. report on experiments in which they had subjects look at images designed to elicit disgust (they depicted dirtiness, faeces, and insects, for example) and also to taste some salty, bitter and sour liquids [7]. They then compared the facial expressions associated with these actions with those elicited by being treated unfairly. The focus on facial expressions of emotion derives from the Darwin-inspired research on the cross-cultural and universal expression of certain basic emotions, which includes disgust. For disgust, the canonical facial response involves wrinkling the nose and raising the lips.<br /><br />They found that all three conditions (images, clips and unfairness in the economic game) caused subjects to raise their lips and wrinkle their nose in a disgust-type manner (associated with activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face). These responses were related to self-reported disgust, but less so for self-reported anger or sadness.<br /><br />These are intriguing findings, and I agree with the authors’ conclusion that they are “consistent with the idea that in humans, the rejection impulse characteristic of distaste may have been co-opted and expanded to reject offensive stimuli in the social domain.” But interpreting their findings is not entirely straightforward.<br /><br />In an accompanying commentary, Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt and Katrina Fincher highlight some of the problems. They describe a three-tiered model of disgust psychology (shown below). In this model, there are, going from top to bottom, stimuli (potential disgust elicitors), a disgust-evaluation system, and a disgust output response (which in turn has nonverbal, behavioural and physiological elements). Some stimuli, such as bitter-tasting drinks, feed straight into the disgust output response. They use the direct distaste pathway common to many animals — and just as animals do not engage a disgust-evaluation system, neither to these basic stimuli in humans. Other elicitors of core disgust, such as cockroaches and certain sexual acts, are processed by the disgust-evaluation system (lacking in animals and young children), which then activates a disgust response.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGQFCrjIhrY248bjxBnUU9a0yzZVg58cIt8GOoWuar1rlwy83ycxTkklwQUFNPegpNGiAUGZuMKPQRWeHmcol_b36fKzEKwp8OPptqWADa5c1Utb2KLN9p299JYzaELi3BwKhClQ/s1600-h/1179-1-med.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 234px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGQFCrjIhrY248bjxBnUU9a0yzZVg58cIt8GOoWuar1rlwy83ycxTkklwQUFNPegpNGiAUGZuMKPQRWeHmcol_b36fKzEKwp8OPptqWADa5c1Utb2KLN9p299JYzaELi3BwKhClQ/s400/1179-1-med.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308203356737601586" border="0" /></a><span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >Domains of disgust.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> The schematic represents routes by which eliciting situations may trigger the disgust output program. Those that run through the disgust evaluation system--which includes appraisal of the elicitor, feelings, and contamination ideation--trigger the full disgust emotion. Solid lines represent routes through which an elicitor can activate the disgust evaluation-output program. Dashed lines (green) represent direct elicitation of the disgust output program. The dotted line (brown) represents a metaphoric, indirect route. (Image copyright of AAAS)</span><br /><br />It is when we move beyond moral transgressions involving aversive substances to more purely moral issues that things get a bit more complicated. As shown in the figure for the case of unfairness, such abstract issues could, in principle, drive the disgust response by various routes. First, they could feed into the disgust-evaluation system, like many other elicitors of core disgust, and trigger a response. Alternatively, they could directly activate the disgust response, in the way bitters tastes do. Finally, moral transgressions related to fairness rather than bodily functions could be associated with concepts or verbal tags that in turn directly activate the disgust response. (We should also ask whether, in any of these cases, the disgust response is really <span style="font-style: italic;">just </span>a metaphor — although they might represent different <span style="font-style: italic;">types </span>of disgust, are they not all a <span style="font-style: italic;">species </span>of genuine disgust? I leave you to ponder that puzzler.)<br /><br />Chapman and colleagues suggest that the disgust experienced when on the receiving end of unfair treatment is in some sense “the same” as that arising from classical elicitors of core disgust (e.g., cockroaches). If the Rozin–Haidt–Fincher model is on track, then this claim would only be true if unfairness is processed through a disgust-evaluation system. And that question isn’t settled by the current study. What is needed, according to Rozin and colleagues, are experiments that “examine the effects of a variety of elicitors on a variety of dependent measures (e.g., contamination, appraisals, and feelings)”.<br /><br />There are some other issues that also need to be ironed out. Previous research has suggested that different sorts of moral violations are linked to different sorts of moral emotions. The anthropologist Richard Shweder has suggested that moral concepts broadly cluster into three families [8]. The ethic of autonomy deals with individual rights, and issues of justice and fairness. The ethic of community is more focused on adherence of group norms related to social stability. And the ethic of divinity draws on notions of bodily and spiritual purity, and the sacred and profane (an ethical domain that has atrophied in Western societies — whether this is a cause for celebration of lamentation is up for debate).<br /><br />Haidt and Rozin have previously argued that violations of the domains of community, autonomy and divinity typically lead to the moral emotions of contempt, anger and disgust, respectively (they call it, rather neatly, the CAD Triad Hypothesis) [9]. According to this scheme, the unfairness in this study should have produced subjects who were more angry than disgusted, but possibly a mix of the two. This is plausibly what happened: raising of the upper lip, which Chapman and colleagues used as a principal measure of disgust, is also activated by anger. And so perhaps it is simply that elements shared with the disgust response were activated, rather than a full-blown disgust response prodded in action by a disgust evaluation of unfairness.<br /><br />In any case, these ongoing explorations and debates continue to reveal the complexity of our emotional and moral lives. What is so strange is how unaware we typically are of all that’s going on when we’re making evaluations about the good or bad, the awe-inspiring or abhorrent, the commendable or condemnable. From the outside, moral disgust can look very simple (not to mention simple-minded): you look, you go ‘Yuk!”, and you say it’s wrong. But this simplicity hides the machinations of an evolutionarily and developmentally complex, and quintessentially human, moral emotion.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Notes</span><br />1. Kass, L. R. (1997). The wisdom of repugnance. <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">216</span>, 17–26.<br />2. Harris, L. T. & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low — neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychol. Sci.</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">17</span>, 847–853.<br />3. Glover, J. (1999). <span style="font-style: italic;">Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century</span> (Random House, London).<br />4. Nussbaum, M. (2004). <span style="font-style: italic;">Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law</span> (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ).<br />5. Jones, D. The depths of disgust. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">447</span>, 768 (2007).<br />6. Haidt, J. & Graham, J. (in press). <span style="font-style: italic;">Social Justice Res.</span><br />7. Chapman, H. A., Kim, D. A., Susskind, J. M. & Anderson, A. K. (2009). In bad taste: evidence for the oral origins of moral disgust. <span style="font-style: italic;">Science </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">323</span>, 1222-1226.<br />8. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C, Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "Big Three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "Big Three" explanations of suffering. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Morality and Health</span> (Brandt, A. & Rozin, P. (eds.) 119–169 (Routledge, New York).<br />9. Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S. & Haidt, J. (1999). The CAD triad hypothesis: a mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity). <span style="font-style: italic;">J. Personality Social Psychol.</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">76</span>, 574–586.</span></span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-30363846160846655572009-02-12T10:17:00.004+00:002009-02-12T10:35:57.483+00:00Happy 200th, Darwin!Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in the Tora Bora Mountains or somewhere similarly remote you’ll have heard that this is a big Darwin year. Not only is it the great man’s 200th birthday (today, February 12th), but November will also see the 150th anniversary of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Origin of Species</span>. (So now you have a reason to use the delightful word sesquicentennial).<br /><br />There will, no doubt, be a deluge of Darwin-related retrospectives and Darwin-inspired speculation today as we celebrate the history of the greatest idea ever, and the man behind it. Science journals and magazines will naturally make the biggest noise. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature</span>, for its part, has put together a stellar <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7231/" target="third_party">issue around this anniversary</a>, and I’m delighted to be able to say that I’m a part of it with <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090211/full/457780a.html" target="third_party">a feature article on human nature, human universals and cultural diversity</a> (see also the issue's <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7231/pdf/457763a.pdf" target="third_party">editorial</a>).<br /><br />Trying to understand human beings in light of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and descent with modification have been controversial from the get go. This approach fell out of academic favour for much of the 20th century (as an understandable reaction to excesses of biologically based theories of human behaviour and identity, from eugenics to the gas chambers of Nazi Germany), but started re-emerging in the 1970s and 80s under the guise of socio-biology, and then really hit the big time with the emergence of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s.<br /><br />Evolutionary psychology has been misread, misunderstood, misrepresented and caricatured in a variety of ways. It has been denigrated as ‘just so’ story telling (after Rudyard Kipling’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">Just So Stories</span></a> in which he spins yarns about, for instance, why elephants got long trunks and leopards got spots). It has been lambasted as sexist, racist, right wing, genetically determinist, greedily reductionist, and flat out wrong.<br /><br />Needless to say, I think much of this is massively misguided (see Steven Pinker’s <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blank-Slate-Modern-Penguin-Science/dp/014027605X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234434415&sr=8-1" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Blank Slate</span></a> for a thorough rebuttal of these charges). But that doesn’t mean I think that evolutionary psychology is flawless in all respects (and it’s an increasingly broad church, with its own internal disagreements). I fully accept the core message of evolutionary psychology: that we need to think about the innate, evolved structure of the human mind (human nature, in other words) in understanding human behaviour. The idea that we’re born as blank slate, which is one of the worst ideas in the history of psychology, has rightfully been slain, and I think evolutionary psychology has been an important aid to this (though the work of linguist Noam Chomsky and various developmental psychologists have also been crucial in this regard – indeed, the ideas and findings coming from these people have been enthusiastically picked up by evolutionary psychologists, who have drawn much inspiration from them).<br /><br />At the same, the particular interests of evolutionary psychologists, and the intellectual climate that the field was initially a response to, has at times lead to a neglect of cultural variation, and processes of cultural transmission and evolution, in human behaviour. This is not, as I read it, the result of dogmatism on any side, but a genuine disagreement about how best to understand human behaviour, human nature and cultural variation.<br /><br />Arguing against the ‘mainstream’ evolutionary psychologists (typically taken to be John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, David Buss, Steven Pinker, and various of their students) are a cadre of anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers. While most of them accept some of the core tenets of evolutionary psychology, and are not afraid to talk about an evolved human nature, they also want to get a much more detailed account of how culture interacts with this given nature to produce manifest behaviour. And it is these sorts of accounts that I run through in my <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span>piece. It’s an exciting time to be thinking about human behaviour, human nature and culture, and I hope this little feature will convince you of that too.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-12894231870107707802008-09-26T12:52:00.006+00:002008-09-26T13:31:42.744+00:00Gracious giving and helping hands<span style="font-style: italic;">Two new papers on prosocial behaviour in monkeys suggest that giving to others can be self-rewarding, and also sensitive to situations.</span><br /><br />Primates are particularly social species. Not only do they frequently live in large groups, but many also behave altruistically to members of their groups. Yet the factors that drive altruism and other-regarding behaviour remain unclear. One idea is that a feeling of empathy drives prosocial behaviour: a feeling of connectedness provides the motivational fuel to help others, which is in turn rewarded with a warm glow produced by activation of reward circuits in the brain (when humans do goof they tend to feel good, and show activation of reward-related brain areas).<br /><br />Aside from exploring the subjective feelings produced by other-regarding actions, or the effects these have in the brain, another way to explore this empathic hypothesis is to look at how people or indeed non-human primates behave. If a systematic bias towards acting in ways that benefits others can be demonstrated, this would suggest that it is intrinsically rewarding or gratifying.<br /><br />Research into the altruistic tendencies of chimpanzees has thrown up a number of conflicting findings. Early studies suggested that chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of others. Joan Silk and colleagues reported that chimpanzees were no more likely to choose an option that benefitted themselves as well as another familiar individual at no extra cost than they were to choose an option that benefitted just themselves <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16251965?ordinalpos=6&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">(1)</a>. Similar results were found by Keith Jensen and colleagues, suggesting that chimpanzees are motivated solely by personal gain <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16627288?ordinalpos=42&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">(2)</a>.<br /><br />Later studies have complicated the picture. Chimpanzees, like young children, will help a human get hold of an object that is out of reach of the human but which the chimpanzee can move into a better position, particularly when this can be achieved with not too much effort (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16513986?ordinalpos=44&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">3</a> – described <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/03/with-little-help-from-my-friends.html" target="third_party">here</a>). Chimpanzees will also help another chimpanzee get into a room to access food, even if the helper cannot benefit from the fruits (literally) of this act — that is, they help regardless of reward prospects <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17594177?ordinalpos=22&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">(4)</a>. This suggests a motive for helping beyond concerns about personal gain, or a selfish cost/benefit analysis.<br /><br />In a paper published in <span style="font-style: italic;">PNAS</span>, Frans de Waal and colleagues have looked at giving behaviour in brown capuchin monkeys (<span style="font-style: italic;">Cebus apella</span>), to see whether there are any signs that empathy for others factors into social behaviour <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18757730?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">(5)</a>. It should be noted that these New World monkeys are much more distantly related to humans that chimpanzees, other African apes, and Old World monkeys. Nonetheless, they can provide insights in the motivational factors involved in altruistic behaviour, which may also apply to more closely related species, and indeed us.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikZzmHbPA5XJ4QVPlV4oVxhlLjs5tPtbGIUdXKwfCtGPA8uM_ZkeS_FwaihRYRc_yB91xWx1k8k-Y3gbjMYX7bxYCJvNRhR4Z65JHI82Zj8r1vBaCi5z8vDd2mzTwkM9OCSG5CdA/s1600-h/monkeylrg.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikZzmHbPA5XJ4QVPlV4oVxhlLjs5tPtbGIUdXKwfCtGPA8uM_ZkeS_FwaihRYRc_yB91xWx1k8k-Y3gbjMYX7bxYCJvNRhR4Z65JHI82Zj8r1vBaCi5z8vDd2mzTwkM9OCSG5CdA/s400/monkeylrg.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5250313396466747058" border="0" /></a>In their experiments, de Waal <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. presented capuchins with a choice of two colour-coded tokens. Selecting one led to a reward solely for the subject (the selfish option) and nothing for a partner visible in a separate room, while choosing the other token produced a prosocial equal rewards for both the subject and partner. (The monkeys had previously been made familiar with such token choices related to different outcomes.)<br /><br />If the monkeys were indifferent to benefitting their partners, then they would be just as likely to pick the selfish option as the prosocial – they choices would look 50/50, or random (there’s little reason to suppose that they would consistently pick the selfish option, unless they were particularly nasty, and observations in the wild do not suggest this). A bias towards the prosical option would, by contrast, suggest a concern with others. And this is just what de Waal et al. found. When capuchins were paired with known but unrelated individuals, they chose the prosocial option significantly more often than chance, and the effect was even stronger when the partner was a relative. The prosocial effect only disappeared when the partner was an unknown member of a different group.<br /><br />In general, prosociality increased with the closeness of the relationship between subject and partner. From an empathy-based perspective, this makes sense, as we feel closer, and therefore more empathetic, towards family members, friends, acquaintances and strangers in that order. The capuchins were also more likely to look towards their partners when they were being prosocial, and to exchange more gestures of affiliation.<br /><br />The kindness demonstrated in these studies was also shown to have limits. In a variant of this set up, the rewards we asymmetric, such that in choosing the prosocial option generated a reward for the subject (an apple) inferior to that given to the partner (a grape – capuchins are apparently particularly fond of this fruit!). Previous studies (again using grape rewards) have shown that capuchins are sensitive to unfairness in rewards for comparable efforts, and inequity was shown to be a factor in modulating giving behaviour in the current study. Preference for the prosocial option in the face of inequity in rewards failed to exceed chance, although came closest to doing so between relatives (so although inequity made the capuchins less kind overall, they were still kinder to kin).<br /><br />The other paper by Jennifer Barnes and colleagues, published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Biology Letters</span>, looked at helping from another perspective <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18812309?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">(6)</a>. These authors take the previous conflicting data on chimpanzee sociality and altruism to indicate that the cognitive operations underlying altruistic behaviour are context-dependent and sensitive to the particular details of a given situation. And it was these details they set out to explore.<br /><br />The team ran two experiments. In the first, a capuchin monkey sat in a room connected to a small annex; in the annex, which was separated from the main room by a grid, sat a toy that an experimenter was trying to reach (see (a) in figure). While it was beyond the grasp on the human, the monkey could reach through the grid and pass the toy to the experiment. In one condition, the experimenter held a reward in their non-grasping hand, and in another they held up an empty hand (these were also subdivided such that half the time the experimenter flapped a hand around trying to reach the toy, while at other times they just held it limply in the annex). In all cases, the experimenter stared intently at the toy, and glanced up to the monkey from time to time. These conditions didn’t make much of a difference, and very few capuchins could be bothered to extend an arm through the grid and manoeuvre the toy into a suitable position for the experimenter, reward or not and irrespective of reaching behaviour by the experimenter.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuJS-0E-AIURBs9WIfn0TZiQPGTMEOevAGx1x9VJklurQEx8dhwL3loDZrmVhYqjXgqNvRRdhaLnz9wLvqT1N8GDKFBPgHV4fxMG5Hoc5E0ly_svSXlqOhaqzQeSXKJc4pfwydYg/s1600-h/Experiment.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuJS-0E-AIURBs9WIfn0TZiQPGTMEOevAGx1x9VJklurQEx8dhwL3loDZrmVhYqjXgqNvRRdhaLnz9wLvqT1N8GDKFBPgHV4fxMG5Hoc5E0ly_svSXlqOhaqzQeSXKJc4pfwydYg/s400/Experiment.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5250314782855830178" border="0" /></a>In the second experiment, the set us was changed slightly: the grid separating the annex from the main room was removed, so the monkeys could easily walk into the annex to get hold of the toy (see (b) in figure). The conditions (reward/no reward, combined with reaching/no reaching behaviour) were repeated as in experiment 1.<br /><br />Now things were different. In these trials, which were run repeatedly, all six monkeys in the study repeatedly handed the toy to the experimenter. This provided data that enabled the effects of reaching and reward to be analysed. Regardless of whether or not the experimenter was actively trying to reach the toy (over and above staring at it, and then the monkey), a reward made the monkeys help more than 95% of the time. By contrast, when there was no reward and the experimenter tried to reach the toy, monkeys helped a little over 50% of the time (and when there was no reward and no reaching this dropped to just over 30%).<br /><br />These results suggest, in the words of the authors, that capuchins are “somewhat stuck on their own personal pay-offs”. In other words, capuchins seem to care more about what’s in it for them than the potential benefits their behaviour could bring someone (admittedly a human in the case). This contrasts with chimpanzees, whose helping behaviour (even when it comes to helping humans) seems to be based more on the desires and needs of their partner.<br /><br />Barnes <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. propose that their findings point to a difference between the lineage leading to New World monkeys and that leading to the apes in the ability to incorporate the perspective of another in overcoming a self-centred bias.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">References</span><br /><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16251965?ordinalpos=6&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">1. Silk, J. B., Brosnan, S. F., Vonk, J., Henrich, J., Povinelli, D. J., Richardson, A. S., Lambeth, S. P., Mascaro, J. & Schapiro, S. J. Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">437</span>, 1357–1359 (2005). doi:10.1038/nature04243<br /></a><br /><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16627288?ordinalpos=42&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">2. Jensen, K., Hare, B., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. What’s in it for me? Self-regard precludes altruism and spite in chimpanzees. <span style="font-style: italic;">Proc. Royal Soc.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">B</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">273</span>, 1013–1021 (2006).<br /></a><br /><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16513986?ordinalpos=44&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">3. Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. <span style="font-style: italic;">Science </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">311</span>, 1301–1303 (2006). doi:10.1126/science.1121448)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17594177?ordinalpos=22&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">4. Warneken, F., Hare, B., Melis, A. P., Hanus, D. & Tomasello, M. Spontaneous altruism by chimpanzees and young children. <span style="font-style: italic;">PLoS Biol</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">5</span>, e184 (2007).</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18757730?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">5. de Waal, F. B. M., Leimgruber, K. & Greenberg, A. R. Giving is self-rewarding for monkeys. <span style="font-style: italic;">Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">105</span>, 13685–13689 (2008).</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18812309?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum" target="third_party">6. Barnes, J. L., Hill, T., Langer, M., Martinez, M. & Santos, L. R. Helping behaviour and regard for others in capuchin monkeys (<span style="font-style: italic;">Cebus apella</span>). <span style="font-style: italic;">Biology Letters</span> 23 September 2008 [Epub ahead of print]</a></span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-26972365512167700682008-03-06T13:51:00.010+00:002008-03-06T14:42:24.463+00:00Two feet good...Along with a big brain, walking upright on two feet has often been taken to be a defining feature of the human line. In this week’s <span style="font-style: italic;">New Scientist</span> I have a <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19726461.700-did-we-learn-to-walk-in-the-trees.html" target="third_party">feature article on some recent ideas about why, and where, bipedality first arose</a>. The ‘where’ question relates not to which part of the globe walking on two feet got going, but whether it was on the ground or in the trees.<br /><br />What? Walking in the trees? It might sound counter-intuitive, but some researchers have recently <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5829/1328" target="third_party">been arguing</a> for just this possibility, based on observations of the locomotor behaviour of orangutans. In the wild, orangutans not only move through the branches suspended by their hands, but occasionally ‘walk’ along branches while stabilising themselves by holding onto braches overhead. This ‘hand-assisted bipedalism’, the suggestion goes, could have been the precursor to bipedality in the human line.<br /><br />It’s a controversial theory. Many other experts in human evolution argue that the fossil record clearly shows that the earliest humans show features of knuckle-walking ancestry. This, the counter-argument goes, points to a knuckle-walking ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas: while the latter species retained this trait, the human line evolved a commitment to bipedalism as it increasingly abandoned life in, and among, the trees.<br /><br />As is so often the case in debates about the course of human evolution, more fossils are needed. It would also be good if researchers could arrive at some sort of consensus about what the existing fossils tell us. I suspect that academic rivalries, and prior theoretical commitments, make this prospect unlikely in the short term. But keep your eyes open.<br /><br />There is an idea even more provocative than ‘tree-walking’ that I was unable to cover in my <span style="font-style: italic;">New Scientist</span> piece because of space constraints. Aaron Filler, a spinal expert at Harvard University with a fascination with human evolution, has recently proposed that the evolution of bipedality has a much older, and much simpler, origin than previous account allow.<br /><br />By studying the spines of many living and extinct mammals, including apes, Filer claims to have documented a series of changes leading to the upright spine typical of humans. And some of these are astonishingly old. Filler argues that the lumbar vertebrae of <span style="font-style: italic;">Morotopithecus bishopi</span>, an ancient ape that lived more than 20 million years ago (some 7 million years before the split between orangutans and the other great apes), shows tell-tale signs that its owner was an upright biped.<br /><br />And for Filler, this has little to do with trees or savannahs. Rather, changes to the spine might have arisen by mutations in ‘homeotic’ genes that orchestrate developmental processes. Small changes to such genes can produce big changes by affecting entire developmental cascades. Filler speculates that an ancient mutation may have produced an individual in a single generation with a lumbar region causing an upright posture – the first bipedal ape. And so orangutan tree-walking is derivative, not innovative. “Bipedalism in the arboreal orangutans is a vestige of their ancestry and not so much a harbinger of the human locomotor style,” says Filler. (Filler has a website based on his book expounding this theory at <a href="http://www.uprightape.net/" target="third_party">www.uprightape.net</a>. Filler also has a video describing various forms of primate locomotion online <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5933355011963516716&q=aaron+filler&total=18&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=7" target="third_party">here</a>).<br /><br />While I’m at it, here’s a cool video of gibbons showing off their arboreal parkour antics (this really needs to be watched with sound, as the mixed in music (Welcome To The Jungle, by Guns'n'Roses) really adds to the film).<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzuFzb6sRdgCIQruHFvr6oIfIg8UNDHNOOeNvvCyHnz6u2d22ttAls0JGwYm5ea3SxgBgbrnoW03DE' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-43584701025499791652008-02-20T15:19:00.004+00:002008-02-21T10:40:34.778+00:00Scientific Happenings on the South Coast<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/travel/gallery/2007/jun/28/beaches/brighton-8405.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/travel/gallery/2007/jun/28/beaches/brighton-8405.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Brighton, UK, is playing host to fourth annual science festival between 23 February and 2 March, and there is lots on offer for anyone living in the region and interested in a bit of brain food. You can browse the programme highlights <a href="http://www.brightonscience.com/07home.php" target="third_party">here</a>, and there are more detailed pages for the various events on the left-hand side of the page this links to.<br /><br />You can catch <a href="http://www.ritacarter.co.uk/" target="third_party">Rita Carter</a> on multiple personalities, <a href="http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/Frith/" target="third_party">Chris Frith</a> on free will, <a href="http://mainlymartian.blogs.com/" target="third_party">Oliver Morton</a> on how plants ‘eat the Sun’, <a href="http://www.philipball.com/" target="third_party">Phillip Ball</a> on nature’s patterns, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fortey" target="third_party">Richard Fortey</a> on life at the Natural History Museum and <a href="http://www2.maths.ox.ac.uk/%7Edusautoy/" target="third_party">Marcus du Sautoy</a> on the ubiquity and importance of symmetry, among many other talks and events. All in all, well worth checking out.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-4822787796914836232008-02-14T15:32:00.005+00:002008-02-14T15:58:26.583+00:00Evolution’s EngineThe ongoing wars over the teaching of evolution (particularly in the US) have elevated into public consciousness an unlikely topic: molecular microbiology. Modern day creationists, rebranding themselves as ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design" target="third_party">Intelligent Design</a> theorists’, have made sweeping, not to say unfounded, claims about the limits on the power of evolution on the basis of a tiny nanomachine called the bacterial <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum" target="third_party">flagellum</a>.<br /><br />This complex structure, made of about 40 interacting proteins, is essentially an outboard motor that powers bacteria through their watery environment. At the heart of the flagellum is a rotary motor that drives a long, whip-like tail, which propels the bacterium as it spins round. It is a magnificent work of molecular engineering (see below).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4/n10/images/nrmicro1493-i1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4/n10/images/nrmicro1493-i1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>For ID theorists, it is more than just awe-inspiring in its complexity and elegance. To them, it speaks of intelligent design. For tactical reasons the nature of this designer is often left unspecified. Yet the context of these claims makes it clear that a notion of a creator, of the kind found in Judaeo-Christian cosmologies, is lurking behind the scenes.<br /><br />In essence, ID is a resurrection of an idea with an old pedigree: the ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument" target="third_party">argument from design</a>’ that the apparent plan and purpose in nature call for divine explanation. The most famous incarnation of this argument was bequeathed to us by English philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley" target="third_party">William Paley</a> in 1802. Paley suggested the following thought experiment. Imagine that, walking across a heath, you stumble upon a pocket watch, and ask yourself “How did this object come into existence?”. A mechanical watch is a complex, highly engineered device, whose interacting parts contribute to the overall purpose of accurately telling the time. It is clearly massively unlikely that the components of the watch achieved their specific forms through natural processes, and then just happened to come together by chance – and then work to serve a useful purpose. No, the existence of watches requires the existence of skilled watchmakers. And by analogy, the wonders of nature reflect the efforts of a thoughtful, intelligent, purposeful creator*.<br /><br />Of course, for evolutionary biologists there is no cosmic engineer or molecular draftsman drawing up plans as part of some biological hobby. The cumulative power of descent with modification — Darwin’s theory of natural selection, in other words — is the ‘blind watchmaker’ of evolution. No cosmic designer needed, thank you. As such, evolutionary-minded microbiologists, geneticists and molecular biologists have felt the need to step up to the charge that the bacterial flagellum is ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity" target="third_party">irreducibly complex</a>’, unevolveable, and in need of an intelligent designer to explain how it can exist.<br /><br />The topic — explaining functional biological complexity at the molecular level — is, of course, of much broader interest. From a purely academic angle, irrespective of the political campaigning of IDists (or IDiots, as some say), the bacterial flagellum is exactly the sort of system we should be looking at the test and refine ideas about the various mechanisms, and specific routes, by which biological complexity arises.<br /><br />And this is just what scientists have been doing in recent years. In this week’s <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/contents/issue/2643.html" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">New Scientist</span></a>, <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19726431.900-uncovering-the-evolution-of-the-bacterial-flagellum.html" target="third_party">I have a feature</a> on what has been found, and what remains unclear, in flagellar research. Scientists do not claim to have wrapped up the story on flagellum evolution. But what is more interesting is the way recent scientific debates about the flagellum highlight the intellectual bankruptcy of ID theory. If you took the ID case seriously, you’d say “OK, the flagellum is irreducibly complex and could not have evolved – done.” You might then move onto the next difficult issue in evolutionary biology, and say the same.<br /><br />The scientists I spoke with, by contrast, have a rather different epistemological approach. Yes, the evolution of complex molecular machines poses difficult questions, but that’s what makes them interesting and rewarding to study. And it’s not that evolutionists just want to club together to shout, “Look, the flagellum evolved – job done!”. They want to get some real explanatory purchase on the problem.<br /><br />This concern with actually working out the details inevitably throws up different ideas, which other scientists then critically evaluate. Analyses are criticised, hypotheses scrutinised and conclusions questioned. This is the sign of healthy science in action; it leads to real insights and refined understanding. In short, the evolutionary approach is a genuinely testable theory, and a viable research programme. Falling back on ID, on the other hand, reveals an intellectual lack of nerve. Where evolutionary biologists face up to the mysteries the universe presents, and are prepared to put in the hard work required to crack them, IDists give up on trying to reach any sort of understanding whatsoever.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*’But who created the creator?’, you should rightly ask. We may reasonably suppose that a creator of biological splendour would be as complex and apparently ‘planned and purposeful’ as the biological ‘creations’ we want to explain. If so, the existence of this creator also needs explaining. To side step this in issue reflects an outrageous double standard: that complexity and apparent purposefulness and design in one domain (nature) require explanation – so much so that might even feel compelled to infer a cosmic creator from them — but that in another (creator gods) such features are a given. It’s no better than when someone points out one of our own double standards, and we weakly try to justify the inconsistency between the standards we apply to others and those deployed in our own conduct by saying “But you see, in my case it was different….”<br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">For more on the flagellum, see:</span><br /><a href="http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html" target="third_party">http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html </a><br /><a href="http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/flagellum_evolu_1.html" target="third_party">http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/flagellum_evolu_1.html</a><br /></span><br /></span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-59517105106170388772008-01-30T23:29:00.001+00:002008-01-30T23:53:37.856+00:00Natural-Born Killers?Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the darker facets of human nature, particularly the human capacity for killing each other. There’s enough going on around the world to justify sinking in to a reflective funk about this persistent and troubling behaviour, from rising gun crime on UK inner-city streets to Darfur Iraq and, more recently, Kenya. But I’ve had another reason for dwelling on the nature of the murderous mind: I have a <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080123/full/451512a.html" target="third_party">feature article out this week in </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080123/full/451512a.html" target="third_party">Nature</a> </span>on current trends in thinking about evolution, the brain, violence and murder.<br /><br />As a species we’re built to compete for resources (money, sexual partners, status, power and so on), and from time to time the friction caused by everyone rubbing up against each other ignites an emotional explosion leading to murder. And we very likely have an evolved coalitional psychology that binds ‘us’ against ‘them’ in conflicts with outgroups (be they defined along national, religious or ethnic lines); the sparks created by abrasive groups pushing against each can all too easily set off an all-encompassing conflagration that threatens to burn down whole societies (you can fill in your own historical or contemporary examples here).<br /><br />It’s not all doom and gloom though. Human history, as revealed by palaeontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and criminologists, has always been plagued by violence and murderous mayhem, both at the inter-personal, one-on-one level, and also in terms of the death tolls exacted by tribal warfare. Yet on timescales from millennia to decades, things seem to be getting better. A much smaller percentage of the populations of modern democracies meet their end through murder of any kind than has been the case for most of the past 5,000 years (see <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080123/full/451512a.html" target="third_party">my <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span>article</a>, and <a href="http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2007_03_19_New%20Republic.pdf" target="third_party">Steven Pinker’s essay in <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic</span></a>, for more on this).<br /><br />On the shorter timescale of decades things also seem to be on the up. For instance, the number of armed conflicts around the world, and the number of people dying in genocidal purges, is also on the decline. <a href="http://www.humansecuritybrief.info/" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Human Security Brief</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> 2006</span></a>, published by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, has documented a number of encouraging trends (though there is still, obviously, much progress to be made):<br /><blockquote>“Notwithstanding the escalating violence in Iraq and the widening war in Darfur, the new data indicate that from the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2005, the number of armed conflicts being waged around the world shrank 15% from 66 to 56. By far the greatest decline was in sub-Saharan Africa….The steep post-Cold War decline in genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians has continued. In 2005 there was just one ongoing genocide—in Darfur. In 1989 there were 10…The number of military coups and attempted coups fell from 10 in 2004 to just 3 in 2005, continuing an uneven decline from the 1963 high point of 25.” (These positive developments are tempered somewhat, the report notes, by increased international terrorism, and greater targeting of civilians in campaigns of political violence.) </blockquote>In my <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span>article, I try to draw out both the causes of violence and murder, and the reasons why they might on the decline over the long term. These are clearly enormous topics, and one could write a big book – or an entire bookshelf – trying to answer these questions, and still leave something important unsaid. In a 4-page feature, space constraints and the need for a coherent arc through the piece mean something has to give. One topic that I wasn’t able to go into in as much detail as I would’ve liked is the possibility that evolution has sculpted the mind to kill. So I’ll explore that idea in a bit more detail here.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Evolved Killers</span><br />Most evolutionary see murder as a by-product of our evolved minds, not as a behaviour that natural selection has sculpted humans to engage in. The business of getting through, and getting ahead in, life invariably brings people into conflict with one another. A colleague’s promotion may come at the expense of our own advancement; a competitor in the sexual market may monopolise the attention and affections of those we desire to have as our own; or a rival in the race for power, status and wealth may stand in the way of our goals. The risk that competition over material resources and reputation (which often serves to enhance the attainment of desirable resources) will escalate into murderous violence is particularly acute among men, who in common with many animal species have both more to gain and lose in the in the evolutionary game of successfully reproducing — and therefore greater incentives to place bigger, and riskier, bets at life’s table (essentially, the variance in reproductive output is greater among men than women, so that some men do really badly and others really well, whereas most women cluster around a similar average success) .<br /><br />On the by-product account, the majority of murders happen when the normal brakes on aggression (fear of retaliation, empathy, and behavioural inhibition) are weak or temporarily overwhelmed by the momentum of an aggressive impulse: after a couple of beers, two hot-heads in a bar start trading insults over pool game, start fighting, take it to the parking lot, and one gets hit, falls, and smashes his head on a curb stone and dies.<br /><br />And this failure to apply brakes on our aggression can also pose a threat to our supposedly nearest and dearest. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, have argued that men frequently use aggression and violence to control and coerce women, which perhaps surprisingly puts them on the same page as many feminists thoroughly antagonistic to evolutionary explanations of relations between the sexes. Occasionally, Daly and Wilson suggest, physical attempts by men to threaten, intimidate and punish their spouses (perhaps to make them think twice before leaving them for another man) occasionally result in “tragic slips” that leave the women dead.<br /><br />Against this mainstream evolutionary account of homicide as a by-product of psychological mechanisms designed to facilitate completion and control of other people, David Buss, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua Duntley, of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, have developed a much more ‘adaptationist’ argument [1-3]. According to their controversial homicide adaptation theory, natural selection has fashioned psychological mechanisms to produce homicidal behaviour in a wide range of contexts, and for a correspondingly diverse array of reasons.<br /><br />Buss and Duntley are critical of approaches to violence that treat it as a singular phenomenon explicable by a single cause — a tendency toward competiveness and risk-taking, or a lack of emotional control and behavioural inhibition, say. The by-product account, contend Buss and Duntley, is too vague, too broad-brush, to be up to the task of explaining the myriad manifestations of murder. Instead, they argue that homicide – the killing of one person by another — covers a range of diverse behaviours, including infanticide, step-child killing, intrasexual rivalry homicides, mate killing, and warfare killing; and their homicide adaptation theory suggests that there is a cold, evolutionary logic to these diverse forms of murder.<br /><br />Men, for instance, can eliminate a potential sexual rival, acquire his resources, gain access to his mate, ascend a status hierarchy, and send out a message about their readiness to use violence in defence their family and property through murder. Women can use killing to protect themselves against a violently overbearing spouse, or a threatening stalker, as well as eliminating potential mate-poaching females. Natural selection could even favour the killing of biological children in situations when, put in the cold calculus of evolutionary logic, the benefits to investing in the new child are outweighed by the costs, or unlikely to be realised (for instance, if times are tight and other kids are already on the scene, then investing in the newborn might be detrimental to the survival prospects of existing offspring; and if the baby is born deformed or otherwise unlikely to thrive, then further investment— and it is painful to write this — might be the biological equivalent of throwing good money after bad). As Duntley says, “Homicide can be such a beneficial solution to adaptive problems in certain, specific contexts that it would be surprising if selection had not fashioned mechanisms to produce lethal aggression.”<br /><br />Given the impact and enormity of murder, it is little wonder it looms so large in literature, art and films. It also plays on our minds a worrying amount too, psychologists have found. Building on research by psychologists Doug Kenrick and Virgil Sheets into homicidal fantasies, Duntley and Buss have found that upwards of 90% of men, and more than 80% of women, have had a vivid fantasy about killing someone.<br /><br />Of course, most people do not act on theses fantasies. And the fact that people fantasise about something does not prove that the act in the fantasy is part of our evolved psychology; many people (mostly teenagers and young men) have fantasised about playing video games, but nobody’s suggesting that gaming is part of human nature. (However, a fascination with pornography is also not something directly selected for over evolutionary time, and there is no evolutionary benefit today for a man to spend time alone with a magazine, or at his computer, rather than getting out and meeting real women; nevertheless, pornography is able to exploit the desire to see naked, sexualised human forms, and the mind has no defence against being tricked and aroused by 2-D images and not just 3-D people in the real world. So it is possible that the predilection so many men have for computer games is explicable by some similar ‘misfiring’ of evolved psychology in a modern context).<br /><br />At the same time, homicidal fantasies, or ideation, can provide a window onto the murderous mind, just as sexual fantasies illuminate the sexual mind. It is not the existence of these fantasies per se, however, that impresses Buss and Duntley. Rather, it is the pattern of these fantasies. Buss, one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychological studies of human sexuality, draws an analogy with sexual fantasies. Romantic and sexual liaisons are enjoyable, so it is little surprise that fantasies about them preoccupy the minds of both men and women. What’s more interesting is the differences in the types of sexual fantasies that men and women engage in. According to Buss, these map onto the different sexual psychologies that men and women have evolved through eons of sexual selection.<br /><br />The same holds for homicidal ideation. Not only do the sexes differ in the types of homicidal fantasies they typically entertain; these map onto the different situations in which killing would have been beneficial to men and women over evolutionary time, according to Buss and Duntley. So men frequently fantasise about killing other men who have dissed them or otherwise challenged their social standing (as well as men trying to steal their girl, or men who personally threaten them); women are often moved to homicidal thoughts by abusive boyfriends (although they too report thoughts of killing mate-poachers, a threat to both men and women).<br /><br />While most people do not act out their homicidal flights of fancy, sometimes they do. Murder does not always result from inflamed passions ignited in the heat of the moment. For example, many men who kill their wives (for cheating on them, say) plan and think through the act before committing it. For Buss and Duntley, this doesn’t make sense according to the standard line in evolutionary psychology that spousal murders typically result from tragic ‘slips’ in men’s attempts to use violence to coerce and control women. On top of this, argue Buss and Duntley, the patterns of homicidal ideation and fantasy correspond to the actual patterns of killings recorded in crime statistics.<br /><br />For Buss and Duntley, this adds up to some compelling evidence in favour of homicide adaptation theory over by-product accounts. As I mention in the text of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span>piece, other evolutionary psychologists remain to be convinced. Curiously, evolutionary psychologists are often portrayed as eager to propose evolved functions for all aspects of human behaviour, seeing adaptation and function everywhere they look. Yet the response to homicide adaptation theory shows this is anything but the case. Many think that there is no need to propose separate adaptations for homicide on top of adaptations for aggression as part of the system of competition – murder occurs as a by-product, not as a result of evolutionary design (D&B would counter that this account is woefully under-specified as an explanatory theory of the actual data on homicides).<br /><br />Even those who remain sceptical about the claims of homicide adaptation theory don’t reject the possibilities of adaptations for murder in principle. As I quote Daly as saying, “I wouldn’t want hitch my wagon to the by-product argument, but I don’t think anyone, including Duntley and Buss, has figured out a good way to identify the hallmarks of homicidal adaptation”. There is also a debate about what counts as an adaptation for killing. Take the case of infanticide. In many species, including langur monkeys and lions, males frequently kill the infants in groups they have recently joined, which eliminates competitor’s offspring and brings females into oestrus so the invading male can have offspring of his own. Anthropological studies have shown that human mothers sometimes kill their own offspring in predictable situations — such as when the baby is deformed or unlikely to thrive, or when current circumstances are poor for raising a child.<br /><br />It might be objected that in the case of human infanticide, the death of the child usually results from the mother simply walking away, rather than a lethal assault. Unlike in the case of lion infanticide (by males, in this case), the behaviour in human is not routine, and nor does it involve a specific infanticidal act, such as a deadly bite. And while there are likely to be psychological adaptations for assessing the current situation or the prospects for the kid, Martin Daly suggests that this doesn’t require anything that “deserves to be called an infanticidal adaptation – it is a de facto infanticidal act if you just walk away.” Duntley and Buss, for their part, think it’s a mistake to focus on whether death results from neglect or direct action. “We argue is that if there is evolved psychological design that reliably produces the outcome of a dead body, then that is design for homicide,” says Buss.<br /><br />There are clearly theoretical, empirical and conceptual threads to the debate over whether humans have an evolved psychology to kill in certain contexts and situations. Some people accept the case of adaptations for infanticide; others for the coalitional psychology of war (see <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span>article). Not many would go as far as Buss and Duntley in proposing such a wide range of homicidal adaptations. But that’s how science progresses: by people putting forward bold hypotheses, which the scientific community then discusses, evaluates and tests. If homicide adaptation theory can come up with better, more specific predictions, about who should be expected to murder and when — and it claims it does — then we will have to confront the unsettling possibility that we are, in part, evolved killers. On the flip side, this recognition may lead to a better understanding of what drives people to kill, and improved strategies for preventing the frequently senseless loss of life at murderous hands. And that can’t be a bad prospect.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Notes</span><br />1. Buss, D. M. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Murderer-Next-Door-Mind-Designed/dp/0143037056/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201713232&sr=1-2" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Murderer Next Door: Why The Mind Is Designed To Kill</span></a> (Penguin, New York, 2005).<br /><br />2. Duntley, J. D. Adaptations to dangers from humans. In <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handbook-Evolutionary-Psychology-David-Buss/dp/0471264032/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201713261&sr=1-2" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology</span></a> (ed Buss, D. M.) p224–254 (Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2005).<br /><br />3. Duntley, J. D. & Buss, D. M. <a href="http://loki.stockton.edu/%7Eduntleyj/pdfs/Duntley-Theplausibilityofadaptations.pdf" target="third_party">The plausibility of adaptations for homicide</a>. In <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Innate-Mind-Structure-EVOLUTION-COGNITION/dp/0195179994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201713282&sr=1-1" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Innate Mind Volume 1: Structure and Contents</span></a> (eds Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S.) p291–304 (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2005).<br /></span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-44563292210271903602007-10-23T17:33:00.000+00:002007-10-24T09:48:00.830+00:00Pride and Preferences – Or How We Live With Our DecisionsNo one likes to admit to having made a mistake. Just look at all the politicians and business people who, with a mess on their hands and owing the public or shareholders an explanation, have uttered the famously weak cop out “Mistakes were made” – a rhetorical device that political consultant William Schneider has suggested we call the "past exonerative” tense. While acknowledging an error, the passive voice of the past exonerative distances the speaker from any causal role in their execution.<br /><br />Realising — and, worse still, publicly admitting — that we have made an error of judgement, a bad call, or acted in a way we are less than proud of is frequently a painful experience. Whether it’s our choice of job, which political party we voted in, the stereo we bought, or how we responded to the homeless guy panhandling at the ATM, most us like to think that we’re intelligent, competent decision-makers and, in general, morally worthy people. When we’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, we feel a mental strain and discomfort that psychologists call cognitive dissonance – two dissonant cognitions, such as “I’m a smart consumer” and “I’ve paid my hard-earned cash for this crappy stereo”, are in conflict, and something has to give. Typically, the preferred cognition is preserved and the other discarded (1).<br /><br />Since the notion was first put forward some 50 years ago, psychologists have made cognitive dissonance one of the most-studied mental phenomena around. And one thing is abundantly clear from this research: humans are equipped with a variety of dissonance-reducing mechanisms that enable us to live with our decisions, our actions and, ultimately, ourselves.<br /><br />The study of cognitive dissonance has thrown up some paradoxical results. For example, people tend to prefer an outcome if they endure more hardship, pain or suffering to achieve that end. In one study, participants were more satisfied with a fraternity they joined the harsher the initiation into the fraternity, all else being equal. From the behaviourist perspective dominant when the idea of cognitive dissonance was first mooted, this makes no sense: why should an outcome associated with pain or suffering be deemed more rewarding than one reached through a less unpleasant route?<br /><br />Seen through the lens of dissonance reduction, however, it makes more sense. As an intelligent, sensible person, we wouldn’t go through a painful or humiliating experience if it wasn’t worth the outcome – in this case joining the fraternity. The dissonance produced by the two cognitions “I am not an idiot who would suffer pointlessly” and “I underwent a severe hazing to join this fraternity” is resolved by declaring the fraternity to be worth joining – and the harsher the hazing, the better the decision (2).<br /><br />One of the ugliest sides to cognitive dissonance comes to light in the self-serving rhetoric we use to justify prejudices. It is depressingly common that persecuted individuals and groups are dehumanised and made to appear as animals — by being kept cramped and naked and filthy in concentration camps, for instance. The victimisers then respond with disgust at the debased and depraved creatures they have created: “Look at these revolting people! How justified I am in treating them as animals!”.<br /><br />Yet for all the importance of cognitive dissonance, the precise mechanisms by which we deal with discordant thoughts and feelings, and the ultimate purpose these mechanisms serve, are not well understood. One way to approach these issues to look at the origins and evolutionary roots if dissonance reduction in human children and nonhuman primates. And in a <a href="http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02012.x">recent study</a> published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychological Science</span>, <a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Elce7/">Louisa Egan</a>, <a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Elrs32/santos.html">Laurie Santos</a> and <a href="http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Bloom.html">Paul Bloom</a> have taken just such a comparative, developmental tack to the problem of cognitive dissonance (3).<br /><br />Egan and colleagues, based at Yale University in Connecticut, devised two tests, one for children, the other for capuchin monkeys, each designed to reveal the reduction of cognitive dissonance in action. The specific kind of cognitive dissonance the authors explored in this study arises when an individual, usually an adult in most studies to date, is forced to choose one item from a set of equally desirable items. Prior to choosing, you have no strong preference for any particular item. Yet being made to choose an item – being forced to create a preference – is discordant with your feelings about the decision you faced. And so after the event, this dissonance is reduced by updating your preferences to reflect the decision you actually made. In the future, the preference generated by the forced choice will stick if the dissonance-reduction machinery has done its job effectively (that is, your new preference is for the selected item, explaining satisfactorily to yourself why you chose it).<br /><br />In the children’s test, each child had to rate the desirability of animal stickers, which kids seem quite keen on, using a scale of increasingly smiley faces (a few kids were eliminated because they had difficulty with the rating system). The researchers then selected sets of three stickers that a given child had rated as equally desirable, and randomly labelled them as A. B or C. A and B were then presented to the child, who was asked to pick one to take home. Then, the unchosen option was offered up against C: so if A was initially picked out of A and B, then B would subsequently be offered alongside C, and vice versa.<br /><br />The idea behind this test is as follows. The three stickers in each triad tested were all rated as equally desirable by the child, so there was no preference for one over another. Then the child is made to choose between two stickers of previously equal desirability (A and B). This sets up dissonance between ordinarily selecting things with the greatest utility (the most preferred) and, in this case, making a choice without a preference - dissonance between “Ordinarily picking according to preferences” and “Picking without preferences in this case”. The tension is resolved by unconsciously updating the preference to match the choice actually made, which enhances the perceived value of the chosen sticker and derogates the value of the deselected sticker. So if A is picked first, B is, after the fact, deemed to be a worse choice, thus explaining and justifying the decision just made: “I picked sticker A because sticker B is rubbish”. No dissonance there. Then when B is offered against C (stickers that were previously seen as equals), C will seem relatively more attractive. So when Egan and colleagues saw this pattern of choice, they took this as evidence of cognitive dissonance, and its resolution, in operation.<br /><br />A similar test was also devised for capuchin monkeys, using M&M sweets of different colours instead of stickers. In addition, because monkeys cannot follow instructions the way a human child can, a different way of measuring preferences had to be used: how quickly they retrieved an M&M of a given colour from a testing chamber. Although the details are more complicated the logic is the same, and after the preferences for 20 different colours of M&M had been established, the capuchins were similarly presented with triads of M&M colours.<br /><br />Both human children and capuchins showed sign of cognitive dissonance and resolution, as revealed by the pattern of preferences for stickers and M&Ms, respectively: in both cases, there was a greater-than-chance preference for C over the unselected option from the A-or-B choice. This clearly suggests that the basic machinery underlying cognitive dissonance, and the tools for making it disappear, are evolutionary old, and emerge relatively early in development (at the least, they don’t require extensive experience in weighing up preferences and evaluating decisions).<br /><br />But a perhaps more interesting are the questions these findings raise about the function of reducing cognitive dissonance - just what does it achieve? An early suggestion was that it was simply the response to two competing cognitions, which might lead to mental paralysis if not resolved. Later researchers proposed that mechanisms for reducing cognitive dissonance exist to preserve our self-image as intelligent, competent, morally upstanding people.<br /><br />Capuchin monkeys do not have a capacity for language, and human children are generally assumed to be cognitively much less sophisticated than adult humans. Yet as Egan <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. point out, their results suggest that either cognitive-dissonance reduction is mechanistically simpler than recent work on the subject has suggested and is not neccesarily related to preserving a complex self-image. The alternative would be to ascribe this sort of self-conception to both capuchins and children.<br /><br />I think, however, that there’s a third way between the options of whether cognitive-dissonance reduction is mechanistically simple or the protector of a complex self-image - it can be both. One of evolution’s favourite tricks is to take some trait that evolved for one purpose and sculpt it to new ends. This process of co-option or exaptation occurred in the evolution of feathers (initially evolved for thermoregulation, than later exploited for flight); exaptation also enabled a sense of distaste, which is widespread in animals, to evolve in humans into ‘core disgust’ (elicited by bodily products, rotting meat and so on), which seems to have been built on through subsequent biological and cultural evolution into the complex cognitive state of moral disgust (the feeling you get when you think about Hitler, or a child molester, for example (4)).<br /><br />Something similar might have happened with cognitive dissonance and strategies for its reduction. Rather than choosing between accepting dissonance-reduction as a simple process or accepting a complex inner life of monkeys, and perhaps we should conclude that monkeys retain a 'simple' dissonance-reductionmechanism that evolved in the primate line. Humans, by contrast, built on this simple mechanism and linked it to other processes, including those regulating our sense of self. And just as children take time to develop a full-blown disgust reaction (which is a cognitively complex reaction), and even longer to feel moral disgust, so too might children, like monkeys, initially make use of simple dissonance -reduction strategies, only later constructing the complex forms of dissonance reduction and ego preservation that we see in adults.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >Notes</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">1. See <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986/ref=sr_1_1/203-3361742-4363138?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193159647&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)</span></a> by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris for an excellent overview of the literature on cognitive dissonance and the strategies and situations that call for the deployment of powerful dissonance-reducing strategies.<br /><br />2. Cognitive dissonance and its subsequent resolution are not the only, or perhaps even the preferred, explanation for this behaviour. A similar phenomenon has been observed in pigeons: in one study, food that took more effort to obtain from a feeder was preferred over food associated with less effort. This result was explained by ‘relative hedonic contrast effects’ – that is, the difference between the feeling experienced trying to get the food and that of actually devouring the food. When feeders exert more effort to get a given food morsel, they experience a greater shift in their relative hedonic (pleasurable) status, so the same food seems better after a worse experience. The same good explain some or much of the findings on effort-justification in humans.<br /><br />3. Egan, L. C., Santos, L. R. & Bloom, P. <a href="http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02012.x">The origins of cognitive dissonance – evidence from children and monkeys</a>. <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychological Science</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">18</span>(11), 978–983 (2007).<br /><br />4. Jones, D. <a href="http://intl.emboj.org/nature/journal/v447/n7146/full/447768a.html">The depths of disgust</a>. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">447</span>, 768–771 (2007).<br /></span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-59073067170773928862007-10-23T17:24:00.000+00:002007-10-23T17:33:07.413+00:00PSOM Back To Life!After a long hiatus, <span style="font-style: italic;">PSOM </span>is set to get going again. It’s been about a year since I last posted, and I should perhaps explain why I’ve not been blogging. Last December I left my job as an editor at the Nature Publishing Group to take up freelance writing full-time. Since then I’ve been busy writing as many features as I can, and I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to write on a wide range on great topics, from <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325931.300-the-neanderthal-within.html">human evolution</a> and <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19225772.000-blueprint-for-a-neanderthal.html">Neanderthal genetics</a>, to <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19325971.800-the-love-delusion.html">delusions in romantic love</a>, the <a href="http://intl.emboj.org/nature/journal/v447/n7146/full/447768a.html">psychology of disgust</a>, the <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19426021.100-top-10-ways-to-make-better-decisions.html">biases and pitfalls inherent in decision-making</a>, <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19325921.800-genetic-road-to-superimmunity.html">genetically engineering the immune system</a>, and the <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19426061.400-is-a-virus-causing-breast-cancer.html">causes of breast cancer</a>. I have a few more pieces in press with various magazines, and I’ll post details as the articles become available.<br /><br />Freelancing is a tough, and at times isolating, business, but if you have work it is greatly rewarding – you get paid to learn about important and interesting topics, speak to some of the best minds around, and then tell other people all about it (with the help of what have, in my experience, been excellent editors). At the same time, it’s not a route to riches and there’s a constant feeling that your efforts should be directed at earning an income – hence the ease of neglecting blogging. It’s time to return to this pursuit though, as it’s both gratifying and a good way of keeping on top of the research I’m interested in (though I can only cover a tiny amount of what grabs my attention – there are only so many hours in a day!).<br /><br />Anyway, I’m kicking things off again with a piece on the origins of cognitive dissonance – one of the best-studied and most fascinating psychological phenomena of the past 50 years. Hope you enjoy.<br /><br />See you here again soon I hope,<br /><br />Dan.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1162217234149014052006-10-30T13:47:00.000+00:002007-02-15T10:35:33.133+00:00Delusions of faith as a science - Henry Gee on Richard Dawkins<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/about/aboutus.html#Gee" target="third_party">Henry Gee</a>, a senior editor at <em><a href="http://www.nature.com/index.html" target="third_party">Nature</a></em> who has handled many of the most important papers on palaeontology over the past decade, <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061023/full/061023-11.html" target="third_party">has weighed in</a> on Richard Dawkins’s latest polemic, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0593055489/ref=pd_ts_c_th_1/202-8762506-0986233" target="third_party">The God Delusion</a></em>, in an online column for <em>Nature</em>. I take issue with practically everything Gee says, but exploring the issues raised is a useful way of finding your feet in debates about religion, and the relation of religious thought to scientific thought. Gee’s piece is short and my response long because I think a number of confusions get run together in a very short space in Gee’s column, and it takes a while to unpack what I see as the errors. So here goes, taking it from the top (I suggest you read <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061023/full/061023-11.html" target="third_party">Gee’s column </a>before going any further).</p><p>The column kicks of with a story of Dawkins’s boast of disabusing a young child of a belief in Santa using scientific reasoning. Gee suggests that for Dawkins to argue against the existence of Santa Claus, and to doubt his ability to speed round the world delivering gifts to all the good children in the world, on the basis of the current state of scientific knowledge is nonsensical. Gee writes: </p><blockquote>Santa can do everything he claims provided he is a macroscopic quantum object. In this way he can be in as many places as he likes, provided that he remains extremely cold, and nobody is watching. Not only does this trounce Dawkins' objections, it also works better as a scientific hypothesis, because it accounts for more of the evidence: we now know why Santa is traditionally associated with cold places, and why he does his work while everyone is asleep.</blockquote><p>It is hard to know what to make of this ‘rebuttal’. There are at least two readings of Gee here. One is that, strictly speaking, scientific knowledge does not refute the existence of Santa, because we can invoke some scientific ideas to render the Santa proposal plausible, even though the notion of Santa who consciously chooses who gets gifts and delivers them personally is hard to square with a macroscopic quantum object.</p><p>This response brings to mind religious apologists, recruited to defend positions of dogma that from time to time come under attack. The task of the apologist is often not to put forward a positive set of arguments to support the position they wish to defend, but merely to show that the position could, in some conceivable way, be possible. Gee does much the same. Santa, as traditionally conceived and presented to children, is a normal three-dimensional object (of not a normal man) who flies round the world in a reindeer-powered super-sledge dispensing his gifts. What we know about the world rules out such a possibility: it would take too long, Santa couldn’t carry all the gifts, and the reindeer would vaporise through heat friction at the speeds at which they would have to travel.</p><p>So what does it show to say, “Well, if Santa is a macroscopic quantum object, it all makes sense”? Not much. There’s no reason to suppose that there is an entity answering to the name of Santa, and therefore no reason to posit either a normal or quantum object that we can identify as Santa. And indeed, it’s not clear that the idea of a quantum mechanical explanation of Santa even makes sense; it might not be a scientific alternative at all, and in any case it is an extremely desperate and unconvincing proposal (think apologists again!). Furthermore, the macroscopic quantum object idea hardly makes better scientific sense of the gift-receiving phenomenon that we have to explain, for we know that parents put the presents under the tree for their kids. There is no reason to believe that Santa exists — there’s not even a need to suggest he exists! — and the current state of knowledge suggests that the object we normally call Santa — fat jolly man with a big white beard and a bright red suit — could not do what he is charged with doing. If a child believes that Santa exists, and he doesn’t believe that parents supply presents each year, then the child could be challenged by appealing to scientific facts (not that I’d recommend this — I’m not defending Dawkins’s debunking per se, but merely the intellectual justification for it). No wonder the lampoon isn’t cited in <em>The God Delusion</em>.</p><p>The other reading might go like this: scientific evidence and reasoning are not relevant to the child’s belief in Santa, and so Dawkins’s approach is as ridiculous as Gee’s idea, which on this reading is Gee being deliberately silly. In one sense, this is right: kids don’t believe in Santa on the basis of reasoned reflection – they believe in him because it’s one of the more benign cultural myths we pass on to our kids. But this doesn’t mean that scientific evidence is irrelevant to either the child’s reflection on a belief in Santa as the child grows up, or our assessment of the reasonableness (in the epistemological sense) of the child’s belief. The evidence offered up by science argues against the existence of Santa, and nothing argues for it – as the parents who supply the presents will readily tell you. So if this reading is correct, it has no import at all, other than to say “Kid’s don’t reason their way to a belief in Santa”. We know this; the question is whether a belief in Santa would be supported by the evidence. </p><p>Gee goes on to say “My intention was to show that Dawkins' use of science to question the existence of Santa is nonsense. The reason is that science and belief are two quite different things, and a child's conviction that Santa exists lies firmly in the latter camp.” Of course belief and science are different things. I can believe all sorts of things that may be true or false – there is cheese in the fridge, wasps sting, pixies live at the bottom of my garden – but they are not science. However, that doesn’t mean there is no connection between belief and science. If I believe that there is cheese in the fridge, there’s an easy way to find out: open to door and take a look (of course, if it’s quantum cheese it’s location may be everywhere and nowhere until its wave function collapses and gives it a definite location; I’m talking about standard cheddar here). This is a scientific approach to addressing whether my belief in the cheese in the fridge is on the money – scientific in the sense that the hypothesis ‘there is cheese in the fridge’ is held up to an empirical test that will be answered by the facts of the world. So scientific investigation can provide ground for believing things and not believing things, and those beliefs that are supported by empirical investigations of the world might be called scientific beliefs.</p><p>Again, we have to ask what Gee means and intends to convey when he says “The reason is that science and belief are two quite different things, and a child's conviction that Santa exists lies firmly in the latter camp”. Here my reading of the statement. There is a body of hard-won knowledge, theories and hypotheses that we call science, and the notion of Santa doesn’t have a place within its walls. Nonetheless, some children still believe in this entity. Which makes me ask: so what? People believe in all sorts of things that are rightly not part of the corpus of scientific knowledge because they do not, in fact, exist (pixies, for one). The fact that the Santa idea is not scientifically supported or even defensible is a reason not to believe in Santa, even as a child (perhaps a precocious one). Children cannot be expected to realise this, particularly when they’re probably designed to be credulous with respect to the claims of their parents. To get back to the issue, the fact that a child can believe in Santa, and that this belief is not in the domain of science (and for good reasons!), doesn’t tell us a thing about the validity of the child’s belief (validity in the epistemological sense – you’re entitled to believe the moon is made of cheese if you wish, no matter how wrong you are). Of course, the point about Santa is an analogy, but what’s the point of all this? To demonstrate that some people believe some things that aren’t supported by science? Quick, stop the press!</p><p>All this leads Gee to “contest [Dawkins’s] central assumption, that the existence of God (or, if you like, Santa) is a hypothesis that can be tested scientifically.” This idea seems to be the most troubling one to people who adhere to religious beliefs. I think there’s a simple reason why: to accept that the claims made by the various religions are hypotheses, whether they are intended to be so or not, opens up the possibility of their disproval, and religious belief is almost designed to be irrefutable (not because the case for religious beliefs is watertight – it’s designed to be irrefutable in principle). Now, I’m not religious, but what am I supposed to make of the claim that people have souls, or that God underwrites moral law, or that we go to heaven or hell (or whatever your preferred destination is) after death? Are they not claims – factual claims – about the way the world is? They’re not metaphors, are they? They’re not allegories, or merely the expression of hopes and desires, are they? No, the claim that humans have souls seems to me to be a scientific claim on a par with the existence of the ether through which light travels or the phlogiston theory of combustion. Both had currency for a while, and then were displaced by improved scientific explanations. As far as the soul goes, there is nothing in the findings of modern science that suggest we need to invoke the notion, and no good reasons offered by anyone else that we do, in fact, have souls.</p><p>More broadly, the claim that there exists a God or gods who created the universe and set it in a motion is surely about the way things once were, and why they are the way they are now. If modern cosmology offers a narrative of the universe that conflicts with religious accounts, we can’t seal off the latter in a protective space and say, “Oh, actually, the claims religions provide are not supposed to be empirical claims about the universe”. If they aren’t, what on earth are they? Dawkins suggests that if the universe was created by a benevolent entity with certain characteristics and interests, then we should expect it to look one way; if it is instead the result of the operation of blind, indifferent physical laws, then we would expect it to look significantly different. Looking at the world as it actually is therefore relevant to adjudicating between the competing visions. (Of course, the existence of terrible suffering, childhood cancer, natural disasters and so on, which seem prima facie cases of facts of the world that point in the opposite direction to a divine and beneficent creator, can always be explained away by clever rhetoric in the style of Gee’s Santa theory – but when what you say about the way the world is can be made compatible with any future state of the world, you’ve offered a pretty empty explanation.)</p><p>I’ve dealt with the first four paragraphs of Gee’s piece – phew! Let’s move on. Gee’s next gambit is this:</p><blockquote>The whole point about faith is that it should not be subject to scientific investigation or attempts of proof. </blockquote><p>Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. Strangely, however, Gee follows this with: </p><blockquote>Douglas Adams (Dawkins' late friend and author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) said, in the voice of God: "I refuse to prove that I exist, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." Given Dawkins' frequent quotation from Adams, it is odd that this most apposite of statements does not appear in <em>The God Delusion</em>. </blockquote><p>Of course, with reasons and evidence in hand you don’t need faith (although it seems to me that the lack of reasons or evidence for God is the basis for insisting that belief in this entity should be based on faith!) The idea that beliefs based on faith are, according to the dictates of the faith system of which the beliefs are a part of, supposed to be immune from criticism, of either the rational or evidential kind, is not a point that is lost on Dawkins (he doesn’t need to quote Adams on this point, which in any case seems to contain an element of ridicule: what sort of a being demands that people believe in its existence, but refuses to provide any reason and instead insists that people take a blind leap of the mind and just say, “OK, I believe”; if I were that sort of God I’d have no respect for the people that did believe in me for no good reason). This protectionist notion of faith is one of the central issues that drives people like Dawkins and myself up the wall. </p><p>This is why. We all have beliefs about an almost limitless number of things. Some of these beliefs, such as the belief that the ground beneath our feet will remain solid, that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that an object falling towards us will continue until it hits us without intervention, operate beneath consciousness and are almost never questioned (at least the latter two seem to be part of our innate knowledge of physics). We also have beliefs that are more prominent in conscious reflection. These might include the belief that smoking causes cancer, that human activity is causing the planet to heat up, or that organisms evolved. In all these cases, people agree that your conclusions about the issue at hand should be based on reason and evidence – surely Gee wouldn’t publish a paper on evolutionary biology that offered mere assertions.<br />Then there is another set of beliefs that relate to the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts, fairies, the power of crystal healing, and the various Gods of the world’s major (and minor) religions (I suspect that being lumped in this category will upset some people, but stick with me for a moment). These are claims that certain things exist and exert a causal influence on the world. In that sense, they are claims to be assessed like any other claim (such that protons exist, or that gravity curves space-time)*.</p><p>Now, of course, Gee and other religionists will object at this point and say, “No, you’re definitely not supposed to evaluate my claim about God like you do other things – it’s a matter of faith!”. At which point I ask: how on earth do decide in advance what areas of knowledge you should to fence off under the protective veil of faith? And isn’t it odd that religious traditions say, “Believe this, but don’t question it”. Does it not sound like a scam to get people to believe things that are palpably not true? Can you imagine if you went to a used-car salesman and he said, “This car goes like a dream – but I’m afraid you can’t take it out for a test run, or examine the motor. Take my claim on faith, and please don’t question my claim with demands for evidence”. You’d run a mile. </p><p>Gee perhaps thinks that having beliefs based on faith is some sort of virtue, but from my perspective it’s about the most serious intellectual vice one could have. It raises so many problems it makes your head spin. What should I have faith in? The God of Judaism, the God of Christianity, the God of Islam? Thor? Poseidon? The tooth fairy? How does faith even get going (obviously from a developmental perspective it’s something usually drummed into kids). As an adult, if three people come to me with different claims about supernatural entities, each telling me to have faith in their claims, and each touting the virtues of faith, how could I possibly decide what to believe, except by thinking “Oooh, that sounds nice”? Fair enough if that’s how you choose what to believe in, but you must recognise that you are therefore communicating to everyone else that there is absolutely no reason to listen to you when you claim that your belief is true. (Of course, most people don’t go around telling everyone else what they think is true, and what other people should therefore believe, but intellectual integrity means that if someone says “I believe X” they are saying “I believe X to be true”, and should be willing to defend that position – or else they should just say, “I believe X but I don’t claim it’s true – I just think it sounds good”, but no one does this).</p><p>We’re not done yet. The idea that religious belief, being based on faith, is immune to rational or evidentiary criticism has an important corollary that religious folk should take note of. Making this claim is, in effect, removing yourself from the realm of reasoned and reasonable discourse. If I meet someone who says “I believe X, and this belief is based on faith, and I will not subject this belief to logical, rational and empirical scrutiny”, then there is absolutely nothing left for me to say in reply to continue the conversation about the belief. The person has just shut the door to a rational conversation – worse still, they’ve cut themselves free from the tether of rationality and are floating free in their own realm of faith-based beliefs. Of course people are entitled to do this, but they must recognise that it is an absolute dead-end to further conversation. Which is why it is almost impossible to seriously engage in debate with anyone who has faith-based beliefs about those beliefs (unless of course you agree with them already).</p><p>This has been long and perhaps a bit pedantic, but the issues really matter, and so I can cope with being accused of over-nitpicking.</p><p>*Gee makes what I see as a superfluous distinction between ‘believing’ and ‘subscribing’ when he says “I ‘believe’ in God, but also ‘subscribe’ to evolution”. I’m in no way suggesting that philosophical debates about the nature of beliefs and knowledge, and what constitutes either state, are easy or settled, but if we uncontroversially take ‘belief’, as used in it’s everyday context, to mean “accept a proposition as being true” then why the distinction? In cases about the empirical world, we all, Gee included, have a number of beliefs: that fire is hot, the ground solid, and what is in our fridge (and sometimes we’re right, and sometimes we’re proved wrong, in both everyday life and science). So on this reading, Gee ‘believes’ in evolution along with a bunch of other stuff. He also believes in God. So why not just say that? Is saying ‘subscribe to evolution’ supposed to denote a more provisional acceptance of this claim than of the existence of a God, which Gee ‘believes’ in? I don’t know.</p>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1158929019716614652006-09-22T12:40:00.000+00:002006-10-25T20:07:01.876+00:00Dawkins the Dogmatist?<span style="font-style: italic;">After reading Richard Dawkins’s new book, </span><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0593055489/sr=8-1/qid=1158928337/ref=pd_ka_1/202-6533682-7976626?ie=UTF8&s=books" target="third_party">The God Delusion</a><span style="font-style: italic;">, <a href="http://www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/" target="third_party">Andrew Brown</a> <a href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7803" target="third_party">asks</a> “who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad?” Are Dawkins’s ideas as daft as <a href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7803" target="third_party">Brown suggests</a>?</span><br /><br />People are, quite obviously, driven to all sorts of acts for all sorts of reasons. People kill people for monetary gain, to eliminate competing sources of power, to exact revenge, and even to advance political causes that the killers think are just (this encompasses not just individuals but also governments that wage ‘just wars’ that will inevitably lead to the deaths of many people).<br /><br />Brown’s review throws up the usual range of questions about the relationship of religion, and atheism, to behaviour, and the causal power of religion (or atheism) to induce people to acts of suicide and murder. Religion isn’t a necessary ingredient for these actions – but does that mean it’s irrelevant? And what about the role of atheism in motivating murderous behaviour? If religion is such a potent force in driving human behaviour, isn’t atheism just the same?<br /><br />Brown writes:<br /><blockquote>Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it's nothing to do with their atheism. He devotes pages to a discussion of whether Hitler was a Catholic, concluding that "Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn't, but even if he was… the bottom line is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism."<br /><br />Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists.<br /></blockquote>Dawkins is suggesting that the motivation for certain ‘evil’ acts (not a word I like, but I think it’s clear that Dawkins means act that most of his readers would consider morally unacceptable) is sometimes religious belief, but that atheism does not have similar effects. Of course, this doesn’t mean that atheists don’t act immorally – presumably, according to Dawkins, when they do act in such a way it is not motivated by their atheistic commitments, nor is carried out in the name, or to advance the cause, of atheism. Brown responds with the line about Stalin killing the priests and the clergy. But what does this fact alone demonstrate? That an atheist committed mass murder – which tells us what? I’m no expert on Stalin’s reign, and so I don’t know what motivated his actions, but is Brown suggesting that his atheism <span style="font-style: italic;">per se</span> was a decisive or contributing factor? It would seem so, when he writes “The claim that Stalin's atheism had nothing to do with his actions may be the most disingenuous in the book”. But what does Brown base the conclusion about the role of atheism in Stalin’s stunning inhumanity on apart from a correlation? If there is evidence that it atheism was a driving force, where is the evidence?<br /><br />And there seems to be a bit of a double standard here. Brown seems irritated at Dawkins’s suggestion that religion can lead to terrible behaviour, but then tries to counter it with by showing that atheism can lead to bad behaviour. If it’s too simple to blame religion for bad behaviour, as Dawkins supposedly does, it should also be too simple to blame atheism, as Brown implies.<br /><br />Brown also takes issue with the suggestion that religious fundamentalism is a causal factor in producing terrorist bombers:<br /><blockquote>[T]he definitive scientific study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win, has just been published by Robert Pape, a Chicago professor who has a database containing every known suicide attack since 1980. This shows, as clearly as evidence can, that religious zealotry is not on its own sufficient to produce suicide bombers; in fact, it's not even necessary: the practice was widely used by Marxist guerrillas in Sri Lanka.</blockquote>Whenever people want to illustrate the lack of efficacy of religion in producing suicide bombers, they always cite the Tamil Tigers, who are inspired by a Marxism rather than an explicit religious agenda (indeed, may Tamils might be atheists). Again, we have to ask what this shows. Imagine that someone wrote a book on the dangers of smoking, and reviewers pointed out that not all smokers get cancer, and that non-smokers also get cancer. Would we say “See, smoking isn’t dangerous after all”. Of course not. The fact that smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting cancer isn’t the point. Smoking can still be an important cause of cancer – even the most important cause of cancer (I’m not saying it is) – even if people get cancer for other reasons. And so when people tried to get smoking banned in public places, or taxes increased to put people off smoking, we wouldn’t be entitled to say “But look, there are some other know causes of cancer, so leave smoking alone!”. It would still be appropriate to single smoking out, critically discuss it, and definitely withdraw government support for it (if there were, say, smoking academies).<br /><br />As I said at the outset, people are motivated to action by all sorts of things, such as political, social and economic inequalities, and the clash of cultures and values (although this is easy to overplay, and can be become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy). In the absence of any commitments to a supernatural being or, alternatively, fully naturalistic worldview, people will continue to rape, pillage, murder, wage war and carry out genocides. Similarly, if everyone stops smoking, some people will still get cancer. The question is whether religion is a causal factor in organised acts of terrorism and other condemnable actions, such as the killing of abortion doctors (and also whether atheism has similar effects) – which is like asking whether smoking causes cancer, regardless of whether other things do too.<br /><br />This is not just about whether certain beliefs and actions are present together. I think we have to pay some attention to explicit reasons people give for their actions (though I appreciate this is far from the whole story – we’re often blind to the non-conscious psychological processes that mould our behaviour). When soon-to-be suicide bombers record their farewell messages, they usually cite a complex of factors that have driven them to this point. Often top of the agenda is a sense of social, political and cultural injustice. Their actions are designed to make a point on behalf of a particular group of people (today most usually a religiously defined community: Muslims). But there is also an undeniable religious component to their actions, which is evidenced by the very language in which their justifications are couched. Pro-lifers that kill doctors in abortion clinics are not shy in citing their faith, and the moral commitments it entails, is support of their deeds. Can we really dismiss as a motivating factor what the people whose behaviour we’re trying to understand actually tell us? Why would we want to?<br /><br />As the Tamil Tigers show, you don’t need religion to be a suicide bomber. The psychology of human coalitions is complex and can clearly be affected by a number of inputs, from favourite football team to familial, ethnic, national or religious affiliation. Ingroup/outgroup hostilities can be bred by all kinds of symbolic badges, behaviours and beliefs. But this simply does not mean that religion should not be discussed as an important cause of strife and conflict. If religion was not such an important causal factor in suicide bombers, why were none of the 9/11 or 7/7 bombers non-religious? Why does religion feature prominently in the video messages the bombers recorded? Why, when a play is put on in Birmingham, do Sikhs in particular, and not the local community generally, stage threatening protests? Why, when the Pope quotes a 14th century writer, do Muslims burn effigies, make calls for capital punishment for those who insult their prophet, and turn up with placards saying “Jesus is a slave to Allah” and “Islam will conquer Rome”? In contrast, why don’t atheists turn up every time there’s a religious speech with banners saying “Behead believers!”? When have you heard of a group of people getting together and killing another group, and then saying “We did this because they believe in a God and we don’t”? If religion isn’t an important factor in motivating suicide bombers, why aren’t atheists, many of whom agree with the political complaints of many of the bomber, equally represented among the bombers?<br /><br />The capacity for humans to commit the most atrocious acts on the fellow humans is strong enough without the moral support of a religious framework. Of course conflict in the world wouldn’t disappear if religions evaporated. No would cancer if people stopped smoking. But that doesn’t mean religion, or smoking, isn’t harmful. Why is it, then, that people are so eager to try to get religion off the hook, and not criticise its potentially dreadful effects? Even if Brown is right to say that a thorough-going atheism is unnatural to humans, that doesn’t equate to support for maintaining religions, or the funding of religious schools by the government.<br /><br />Dawkins might oversimplify the link between religion and murder and immorality (I haven’t read the book, so I’ll suspend judgement), but in response his critics tend to go too far in trying exculpate religion for its negative consequences. The reality is more complex than perhaps either suppose.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1158620554342286312006-09-18T22:54:00.000+00:002006-11-14T22:34:49.836+00:00Tenacious Neanderthals<span style="font-style: italic;">Neanderthals, our closest relatives in the fossil record, might have survived for longer, and co-habited with modern humans more extensively, than previous studies have proposed, suggests a <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature05195.html" target="third_party">paper </a>recently published online by </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html" target="third_party">Nature<span style="font-style: italic;">.</span></a><br /><br />This year marks the sesquicentennial of the discovery of the fossilised remains of an individual that would become the prototypical, or type, specimen of a new species of human, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">Homo neanderthalensis</span></a>. In 1856, lime quarry workers in the Neander Valley in western Germany recovered a number of fossils, including fragments of the cranium, of a human skeleton that was initially thought to be a diseased modern human. Later, as similar remains were found in other parts of Europe, the Neanderthals, as they were named in honour of their place of discovery, became accepted as a distinct, and extinct, type of human.<br /><br />Neanderthal bones or their associated technology (including hand axes fashioned out flint) have since been found across Europe and into western Asia. Fossil remains bearing at least some of the distinctive features of Neanderthals are seen in bones 600,000 years old, although the full range of Neanderthal features don’t come together into the ‘classic’ Neanderthal form (such as the type specimen found in the Neander Valley) until about 100,000-200,000 years ago. The ancestors of Neanderthals (and of modern humans), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">H. heidelbergensis</span></a>, lived in Africa, and about 600,000 years expanded into Europe and western Asia. This can be inferred from the trail of artefacts that they left across the newly inhabited continent. Stone tools, such as hand axes, first appear in archaeological sites around 1.7 million years ago in Africa, but then 500,000 years ago are seen all over the place in large areas of Europe. These technology-wielding people in Europe subsequently evolved into the Neanderthals (the stone tools used by the Neanderthals are called ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian" target="third_party">Mousterian</a>’ after the Le Moustier site in France).<br /><br />The early humans that remained in Africa after the diaspora that led to the colonisation of Europe and the emergence of the Neanderthals later ventured out of Africa themselves, and into the Neanderthals’ range, sometime around 40,000-60,000 years ago. Anatomically modern humans had evolved in Africa roughly 160,000 years ago, but these later pioneers were also recognisably behaviourally modern, and the artefacts they made suggest a more complex culture and sophistication than either previous humans or Neanderthals. In fact, the presence of modern humans, or Cro-Magnons, in Europe is often inferred from the sorts of artefacts that are found in archaeological digs (and the same goes for the Neanderthals – it’s not just about bones). By about 45,000 years ago, modern humans lived in Europe and Asia.<br /><br />Then something dramatic happened. Sometime within the past 35,000 years, after a good evolutionary innings, the Neanderthals stepped out of the evolutionary game, and modern humans went on, at least temporarily, to become masters of the sport of global dominance. Why the Neanderthals failed where the Cro-Magnons succeeded is a matter of intense debate. Potential explanations include a genocide by the Cro-Magnons against the Neanderthals, hostile climate, and the cultural superiority of the Cro-Magnons that gave them an edge in competition for resources and habitats. The notion that climate was the decisive blow to the Neanderthals has been re-asserted recently, but a problem with this idea is that Neanderthals seemed to have coped pretty well with climatic conditions that varied widely over a geologically rapid time frame (as quick as 1,000 years), and which could rapidly change glacial regions in to much warmer environments. Neanderthals managed with the challenges of climate for perhaps 30,000 years, so why did they stop coping after modern humans turned up?<br /><br />One important issue to look at in exploring these explanations is whether Neanderthals and modern humans co-habited, and what the effects were of living together. The Neanderthals certainly disappeared after modern humans arrived on the scene, but how long was the overlap? A long period suggest that the modern humans didn’t suddenly wipe the Neanderthals through mass murderer, and could suggest that another factor did them in.<br /><br />Like practically every question in human palaeoanthropology, this is a vexatious issue. Depending on which dates you rely on, and which sites you look at, the speed at which Neanderthals died out ranges from just 2,000 years in some places to 10,000 in others. These estimates are derived from the age of the earliest modern human remains (bone or artefact) and the latest Neanderthal in a similar location – both of which have potentially significant error bars. This makes the discovery of Neanderthal remains that are younger than previous finds very interesting, because it suggests that the Neanderthals persisted for longer and therefore died out more slowly – and so perhaps modern humans weren’t such a potent force after all (although you could perhaps draw the same conclusion about climate, and assume that any Neanderthals that survived later coped with the climate until modern humans came along).<br /><br />Writing in <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature </span><a href="http://www.gib.gi/museum/clive.htm" target="third_party">Clive Finlayson</a> and colleagues report just such remains – of Mousterian artefacts, if not bones, in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar that they claim are at most 28,000 years old, and perhaps as young as 24,000 years. As the authors admit, this only allows a reasonable inference that Neanderthals inhabited the cave. But if this assumption is correct, and the dates accurate (which is contentious), then these findings push the date of the most recent Neanderthals a couple of thousand years nearer the present. The authors interpret this as evidence that Cro-Magnons were not such a potent evolutionary poison to the Neanderthals.<br /><br />It is not clear, however, how significant these dates are, even if accurate. Perhaps modern humans weren’t in this outpost of southern Europe at the time, and the Neanderthals were surviving there just as they had done elsewhere in Europe, against the slings and arrows of outrageous climate change (perhaps Gibraltatr was a more hospitable locale, and that’s why they went there), until modern humans arrived and spoiled the party. Even if the general pattern of modern human contact with Neanderthals was rapid extinction of the latter, it seems reasonable to suppose that some areas would remained free of modern humans for longer than others, and that the dynamics of elimination of Neanderthals would have differed from region to region and across time. And so this find, remarkable as it is, seems to be compatible with the general idea that the evolutionary death knell for the Neanderthals was sounded by modern humans.<br /><br />Future work will have to resolve the dating issues (John Hawks has a detailed discussion of some of the technical aspects of the find <a href="http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/gorhams_28000_date_2006.html" target="third_party">here</a>), and assess the validity of the conclusions tentatively drawn from this study. But the contents of Gorham’s Cave are likely to provide another chapter in the increasingly long and complex book of human evolution.<br /><br />For another good article on Neanderthals, this time their genome, see <a href="http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/08/07/499/" target="third_party">here</a>.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1157932760690162882006-09-10T23:53:00.000+00:002006-09-17T19:11:28.930+00:00Soap For The Soul<span style="font-style: italic;">The notion of spiritual and moral purification through rituals of physical cleansing such as baptism might be based on more than mere metaphor, suggests <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/313/5792/1360k" target="third_party">new research</a> published in a recent issue of </span><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/" target="third_party">Science</a>.<br /><br />Religious traditions are rich with elaborate ceremonial rituals that the faithful undertake with deep symbolic reverence. Many of these rituals involve cleaning the body as part of the process of washing away moral stains on the soul. Perhaps the most obvious example in mostly Christian societies is the practice of baptism (which also forms part of the religious traditions of Sikhism and Mandaeanism).<br /><br />If the ritual of baptism was just a metaphor for the remission and washing away of the sins of the soul, it wouldn’t much matter how the cleansing was achieved. But the different forms of baptism carry different symbolic messages: some baptism ceremonies merely demand that water be sprinkled onto the baptee’s head from above (representing the gift of remission from God above), whereas others go for full submission to denote the death and burial of Christ and his subsequent rise from the dead as the Holy Spirit.<br /><br />At a theological level, the point of a baptism is not to give the recipient a good wash, nor is intended merely as a metaphor for washing away sins: it represents some of the core values and cherished beliefs of the religious community in which the ceremony takes place. But might there be deeper reasons why such cleansing rituals are so widespread at all? Could it be that actually getting cleaner during these acts of worship actually makes the recipient feel literally morally cleaner, and that’s why the idea of cleansing rituals so popular? The new study, by <a href="http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/facBios/viewFac.asp?facultyID=chenbo.zhong" target="third_party">Chen-Bo Zhong</a> and <a href="http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/doctoral/mors/students/Liljenquist/" target="third_party">Katie Liljenquist</a>, provide some tantalising results that we really do behave as if soap and water can wash away a moral transgression (without even bringing God into the picture).<br /><br />How might this work? Well, a lot hinges on the role and function of the universal human emotion disgust. Disgust is a strange emotion in that it can be aroused by a both physical objects (rotting carcases, bodily fluids and waste products and so on) and also people’s behaviour (rape, paedophilia and so on), unlike, say, anger: it doesn’t make sense it be angered by a rock, even if you stub your toe on it (though I admit I’ve shouted at a fair few number of inanimate objects). Psychologists have suggested that disgust originally evolved as protective gateway to the mouth: a mechanism to prevent the ingestion of dangerous foodstuffs (people around the world produce the same sort of facial expression as part of the disgust response). Later, the domain of disgust enlarged to include the social and moral domains, such that moral disgust became a defence against contamination and corruption of the soul. This connection is partially revealed by the habit of using many of the same terms for physical states that elicit disgust (dirtiness) for those that arouse condemnation (dirty behaviour) as well.<br /><br />In fact, experiencing physical disgust produces bodily responses, such as facial expressions, similar to those caused by considering an immoral act. Even overlapping parts of the brain are activated by the two types of disgust reaction. So if similar brain areas and psychological states are activated by moral transgressions and physical dirtiness, then perhaps the intensity of the former could be reduced by acts that reduce the latter.<br /><br />Zhong and Liljenquist call the phenomenon of trying to reduce the negative feelings associated with threats to moral purity the ‘Macbeth effect’. Striving to secure the throne for her husband, Lady Macbeth kills King Duncan, and tries to frame his servants for the murder. Racked with guilt, a somnambulant Lady Macbeth attempts to wash imaginary stains off of her hands, crying “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” – wash away the blood, and the guilt will cleaned away too. The results of Zhong and Liljenquist’s study raise the potentially unsettlingly possibility that Lady Macbeth might have had more success in easing her conscience than we would ordinarily credit.<br /><br />In the first experiment, Zhong and Liljenquist explored whether a threat to our moral self-image prompts a desire for physical cleansing. Participants were asked to dredge up an instance from their biographies in which they had either acted ethically or badly, and to describe the experiences associated with those recollections. They were then presented with a world puzzle of six word fragments presented like a partially completed game of Hang Man. Three of the fragments could be filled in to produce a word related to cleaning (W_ _ H, SH_ _ER, and S_ _P can be completed as wash, shower and soap, as well as wish, shaker and step). Participants who recalled an unethical deed from their past were more likely to complete these three fragments to form the cleansing-related words.<br /><br />Previous studies have shown that subtle priming of a topic, below the threshold of awareness of consciousness, can make other words, concepts and behaviour related to the prime more likely to surface by increasing the accessibility of these concepts and behaviour. The increased accessibility of cleansing-related words, primed by a threat to moral self-image, suggests that the protective Macbeth effect really does exist.<br /><br />The second experiments further probed the Macbeth effect: does this increased accessibility to concepts related to cleanliness actually relate to an increased desire to clean oneself? (It’s possible that the effect of word recall would be unrelated to any actual behaviour.) After being instructed to hand-copy a short written story, in the first person, that depicted either ethical or immoral behaviour, participants had to rate a series of supermarket goods. Some of the items, such as shower soap, toothpaste and cleaning products, were related to cleansing, whereas others, including Post-It notes, fruit juice and batteries, were not. In line with the proposed Macbeth effect, copying out the unethical theory had the effect of making cleansing products more appealing.<br /><br />But again, expressed preferences are one thing, actual behaviour another. So Zhong and Liljenquist looked at whether, after being put through the set up in the first experiment, participants would prefer as a free gift a cleaning-type product (antiseptic wipe), over something with no cleaning connotations at all (a pencil, which had previously been shown to be an equally attractive choice in a control condition). Overall, those that had recalled some of their unethical behaviour preferred the antiseptic wipe, which again points to the operation of the Macbeth effect.<br /><br />But this isn’t the end of the story. If the Macbeth effect exists, it’s likely to have some function, one that is fairly obvious: to protect our moral self-image, often a crucial guide to navigating our social and moral worlds. Other research has suggested that we strive to restore our moral identity after ethical transgressions, spurred on by the emotional consequences produced by reflecting on our actions. Sometimes this takes the form of making up for a bad deed with a compensatory good one. There is also evidence that merely contemplating a threat to some cherished value produces a desire to act so as to reassert that value.<br /><br />If moral threats and damage to our moral self-image can be deflected and thwarted in ways that either reaffirm our values or restore on moral selves, perhaps they can be averted and fixed by more symbolic means that exploit the overlap between the domains of physical and moral disgust. So a key question is whether the bodily cleansing induced by threats to our conception of our moral selves actually has the proposed effect of reducing the magnitude of the threat, and its unpleasant consequences. Zhong and Liljenquist capped off their study by addressing this central issue.<br /><br />In the final experiment, participants were again asked to recall a bad deed from their past. Half then washed their hands with an antiseptic wipe while the others didn’t, and all were asked to fill out a form surveying their current emotional state. Finally, they were asked whether they would donate their time, free of charge, to take part in another study for a desperate graduate student.<br /><br />The negative feelings aroused by contemplating behaviour which the participants were not proud of would presumably have led to a desire (conscious or not) to make amends by doing something that expresses the moral commitments they would prefer to see in their self-image, or to otherwise erase the stain of moral impurity through an act of cleansing. In this set up, the cleansing option was forced on half the study subjects, which had the effect of reducing feelings of the negative moral emotions of disgust, regret, guilt, shame, embarrassment and anger (non-moral emotions were unaffected). Mere hand washing also reduced the likelihood of offering help to the student in dire straits – if you’ve cleaned your conscience, there’s no defect in the moral self-image to fix.<br /><br />The implications of the Macbeth effect, and this demonstration of its power to influence moral behaviour, is potentially alarming, and leads to a counter-intuitive thought. If is often supposed that observance of religious practices and rituals forms a core component of an ethically grounded life. But these results plausibly point to an entirely different conclusion. If threats to the moral self-image of individual religious adherents can be countered through cleansing rituals rather than actually amending the moral offence, and if such rituals make compensatory moral behaviour after an ethical blunder less likely, then a religious life could, all else being equal, make the devout <span style="font-style: italic;">less </span>moral! This is another empirical question, and it is likely that other factors will feed into the overt moral behaviour we observe.<br /><br />In any case, physical cleansing, even if intended as a symbolic offering of commitment, seems a rather cheap and easy route to moral rectitude. But at least it might help make sense of how many ostensibly morally upstanding and devout followers of various religions can also be capable of living with themselves and a range of moral misdemeanours and sinful behaviours, sexual and financial*. And the celebrity pages are replete with cases of decadent, immoral stars who have renounced their wayward pasts, and been born into the glory of God’s kingdom through the miracle of baptism, all beneficiaries of the Macbeth effect. Perhaps for the faithful cleanliness really is next to Godliness.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*Of course, the religious aren’t alone in such self-serving attempts to restore moral integrity with a quick fix. We can all imagine the ruthless, atheistic businessman who rips of poor nations left, right and centre and then makes a seemingly large but to him insignificant donation to charity (tax deductible, of course) to assuage his guilt, which might not even be consciously acknowledged. </span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1157226971889365702006-09-02T19:51:00.000+00:002006-09-03T03:53:40.940+00:00Be Afraid, Be Very AfraidI’ve just watched a <a href="http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/jesuscamp/trailer/">trailer for the new documentary <span style="font-style: italic;" target="third_party">Jesus Camp</span></a>, which charts the rising trend of recruiting children into ‘God’s Army’ and instructing them on their moral duty to wage a Christian war on their enemies. And who might these be? Well, a clue is provided by one woman who says “There are two types of people in the world: those who love Jesus and those who don’t”. Without seeing the film it’s not clear whether she means the enemy are people who don’t believe in a God or Jesus (let alone love either of them), or those that believe in a different God and reject Jesus as salvation.<br /><br />In any case, such a ridiculously simplistic dichotomy of humans into an enormous ingroup of Christians and an even bigger outgroup of non-Christians is a recipe for disaster. I recently wrote about <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/08/beware-of-others.html" target="third_party">parochial altruism</a>, or the tendency to be more lenient towards our ingroup and less forgiving of outgroup members. This proclivity can be pernicious enough when groups are differentiated on the basis of relatively meaningless symbolic markers, such as which football team you support (and therefore what shirt you sport), or other social or linguistic differences. Add a deeply held and powerfully inculcated moral dimension to this, and the degree of ingroup–outgroup hostility will only flare up. If you truly and dogmatically believe that you and your kind are on the one true path to salvation, that your group alone is acting according to the moral dictates of your God and saviour, then it is only natural to take a tough line towards anyone that threatens the beliefs of your group, by either denying the existence of your God or towing the line of a different one.<br /><br />Commentators and theologians are not blind to the harmful effects of stressing differences between religious groups, and often try to downplay the inherent conflicts created when religious communities come into contact with one another. But ecumenical attempts to persuade everyone to just get alone always ring a bit hollow to me. If religious adherents sincerely believe in their chosen (or inherited) faith and implicitly assume the their sacred texts are inerrant and infallible guides to living a good life, then there really is a clash between different religions. Christians should view Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and so on with suspicion (and likewise). They should feel that other religions, or the rejection of religion, pose a moral threat to the fabric of society. It’s hard to find a middle ground between moral positions that are taken to set in stone, based on ancient codes that are absolute and unchangeable.<br /><br />My preferred strategy is to be open about the often-irreconcilable conflict between different religions — and to use this fact as a starting point for keeping religiously motivated moral prescriptions out of the spheres of social and public policy (education, the law, medicine and the like). If we’re going to try to strike a balance between the competing demands of different religious groups, we can’t use the frameworks of any given religion to do so (that would be pretty unfair, and create much marginalisation). Instead, we will have to make recourse to rational, secular, non-religious principles – using reason, argument and evidence to advance our claims. Although this will get up the noses of a number of people, it seems the only defensible way forward.<br /><br />Of course, following such a course is no guarantee that everyone will get along. But that is not an inherent problem of a secular approach to structuring society; it would seem to stem more from the nature of the beliefs held by those in conflict. In any case, we already accept that the national policies adopted in democratic societies will leave a significant number of people with a grievance. For instance, British National Party members are no doubt annoyed that their views on immigration and the racial composition of the UK are not mainstream, and this has historically stoked conflict, but we don’t say “Well we’d better bring them to the table too, and incorporate their vision”. So too with religious groups. Just because they’ll be upset if society is run on secular line doesn’t mean they have the automatic right to be given power to influence the sort of societies we live in.<br /><br />If people could be persuaded to drop some of the dogmatism of their belief, and accept that difficult social, cultural and political problems require open hearts and minds for their solution – essentially a rejection of the certainties and dogmatism to which they are accustomed – then perhaps a greater dialogue and understanding between groups could be achieved. This, no doubt, all sounds very ‘right on’, optimistic and perhaps even a bit naïve; but a greater understanding of the psychology underlying our moral judgements and social behaviour could provide our best hope for reducing the conflict endemic around the world, from the ‘Culture Wars’ of the US to the ongoing troubles in the Israel, Lebanon and the Middle East. We need to recognise that no one has the last word on how we should by virtue of adhering to the tenets of a holy book, and that different cultures and social groups can legitimately stress different aspects of the moral realm.<br /><br />Cultural psychologists have suggested that moral issues cluster into at least three different realms: the ethics of autonomy (individual rights), the ethics of community (social codes) and the ethics of divinity (purity and sanctity*) [1]. It seems that at least some of the friction encountered when liberals clash with conservatives arises from the moral domains that they are most concerned with (the ethics of autonomy for liberals, and for conservatives an expanded domain that touches on the ethics of community and perhaps also divinity) <a href="http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.sexual-morality.pdf" target="third_party">[2]</a>. Neither domain is necessarily better or more justifiable than the other, and recognising that our different cultural backgrounds may lead us further into one domain than another provides a jumping off point for truly trying to engage with the concerns and arguments of your ‘adversary’, whether liberal or conservative. Unless, of course, you’re absolutely certain that the morality you embrace is underwritten by God, the cosmic law giver, and that deviation from your moral path is an affront to your creator, a transgression punishable by eternal torment.<br /><br />Productive conversations cannot take place between disputants that start from radically different and immovable moral positions. A bit more humility is required. We need to accept that we must listen to the arguments of other people, and possibly revise our stances in light of what they say. This cannot happen when two (or more) sincerely and held religious belief systems come into conflict (except perhaps for some very general claims, such as ‘killing is wrong’ – but you hardly need a religious basis for thinking that!). And this is why making children more fundamentalist -- more certain that anyone who thinks something different from them is an enemy to be thwarted, and certainly not persuaded by -- is a sure fire way to ensure that we all go to hell in a hand basket.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />*The ethics of divinity are usually somewhat alien to many Westerners, especially of the non-religious variety, who typically occupy the two-dimensional plane created by the axes of ethics of community and ethics of autonomy. The ethics of divinity have been characterised in the following way:<br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;">“The ethics of divinity: divinity/purity violations. In these cases a person disrespects the sacredness of God, or causes impurity or degradation to himself/herself, or to others. To decide if an action is wrong, you think about things like sin, the natural order of things, sanctity, and the protection of the soul or the world from degradation and spiritual defilement.” [3]<br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Notes</span><br />1. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M. & Park, L. The “Big Three” of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the “Big Three” of suffering. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Morality and Health</span> (eds Brandt, A. & Rozin, P.) 119–169 (Routledge, New York, 1997).<br /><br />2. Haidt, J. & Hersh, M. Sexual morality: The cultures and emotions of conservatives and liberals. <span style="font-style: italic;">Journal of Applied Social Psychology</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">31</span>, 191-221 (2001).<br /><br />3. Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S. & Haidt, J. The moral-emotion triad hypothesis: A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral ethics (community, autonomy, divinity). <span style="font-style: italic;">Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">76</span>, 574-586 (1999).Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1156464375069713392006-08-24T23:53:00.000+00:002006-10-26T09:36:08.770+00:00Beware of the Others?<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7105/full/nature04981.html" target="third_party">New research</a> published in </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html" target="third_party">Nature</a> <span style="font-style: italic;">shows how biases towards members of our social group, and against those outside it, shape how generous we are to people and how we punish others for transgressing social norms.</span><br /><br />Humans are socially sticky: we bond into cohesive groups that commonly share a common identity and, often, similar values. This applies to social circles and local communities as much as to nationality and global religious and political affiliation. Such unity can encourage people within the group to pull together, to help one another when in need – in short, to get along.<br /><br />But there’s a downside to human ‘groupishness’: a mental division between members of the ingroup, to whom social and even moral obligations apply, and various outgroups, to whom they do not. People who live in different groups — geographical, social or ethnic — often treat outgroup members as ‘others’ (something viewers of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost </span>will be familiar with), frequently arousing enmity and stoking conflict. Note how groups really come into their own and pull together when pitted against other groups in the human speciality of war.<br /><br />The ingroup–outgroup distinction has the power to distort and bias our attitudes towards outgroup members in pernicious ways. These prejudices are played out locally and globally on a daily basis. When supporters of our football team brawl with the other team’s, we can easily blame our opponents on starting the trouble “They always cause a ruckus, don’t they?”). When our country is at way with another, we’re justifiably retaliating against military aggression (“We’re merely defending ourselves against those lunatics across the border”). Behaviour of ‘our people’ that is deemed to be tolerable can be judged intolerable or immoral or worthy of punishment when people of other groups do the same thing.<br /><br />The nature of human altruism (helping others), and the role of altruistic punishment (paying a cost to punish those that don’t help others) in establishing cooperation and a bases for sociality, are currently two of the most active areas of research in the behavioural sciences. Nearly every aspect of altruism and cooperation you can think of is being explored: <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/08/punishment-global-tour.html" target="third_party">how altruistic behaviour and willingness to punish non-altruists varies across societies</a> with differing social systems (and also what universal trends underlie human altruism); how this variation relates to economic and demographic factors; how people respond to punishment for not cooperating, in both laboratory and real-world situations; <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/04/to-cooperate-or-free-ride-picking.html" target="third_party">the role of institutions that embody social norms of behaviour in maintaining cooperation</a>; and what’s going on in the brain when we cooperate and defect in games of altruism with other human players.<br /><br />One of the most crucial findings of this research is the extent to which people will incur a cost to punish non-cooperators, and how powerful a force this is in eliciting cooperation from those tempted to defect. Studies with economic games across the world have revealed that the degree to which people will take a monetary hit to punish the unequal division of a sum of money (provided by the experimenter) increases as the split becomes more unequal.<br /><br />But this isn’t the whole story. Behind the general trend lurks much variation. Perhaps the most important way in which punishing behaviour varies is in the threshold of selfishness that elicits punishment from others. Players living in certain societies won’t punish until the outcomes of dividing money in economic games is grossly unequal, whereas other are much quicker to lay down the law. Some societies even have norms that lead to the punishment of unequal but hyper-fair splits of the money stash (so that the person controlling how much is given to another a player gives away more than 50%), which is something of a puzzle.<br /><br />The <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7105/full/nature04981.html" target="third_party">new study</a> addresses a different question, one about altruism, altruistic punishment and groupishness. Do we respond to transgressions of social norms by our ingroup differently than violation of those same norms by members of an outgroup? Are we more forgiving of the former and harsher on the latter by virtue of their group allegiance? The answer looks like a qualified ‘yes’.<br /><br />Economists Helen Bernhard, <a href="http://www.iew.unizh.ch/home/fischbacher/" target="third_party">Urs Fischbacher</a> and <a href="http://www.iew.unizh.ch/home/fehr/" target="third_party">Ernst Fehr</a> took an experimental game called the third-party punishment game (3PPG) to Papua New Guinea to play among the indigenous people. In this version of 3PPG, games involved three players, A, B and C. At the start, the experimenter gave player A the sum of 10 kina (a good day’s wages in Papua New Guinea). Player A, also known as the Dictator, then had to decide an amount to give to player B, the Recipient (who simply received whatever the Dictator offered). Player C, the Third Party, then had a choice of imposing a punishment on player A (the Dictator) in light of what they had given to B (the Recipient). The punishment worked like this: when the Dictator received their initial 10-kina stash, the Third Part player was given 5 kina. The Third Party could then spend 0-2 kina to punish the Dictator, such that for every kina spent by the Third Party, 3 were lost by the Dictator.<br /><br />Players for the 3PPG were recruited from two distinct and non-hostile indigenous groups, who were then mixed together in four experimental conditions. In one set of games, players A, B and C were from the same group (ABC); in the others, either A and B (AB), A and C (AC), or B and C (BC) were co-members of the same group.<br /><br />What might we expect to see happening in these groups? Well, the ABC case is like many experiments that have revealed a willingness to punish those that violate norms of sharing — that is, Dictators that try to hog most of the cash for themselves are penalised by Third Parties, which leads many Dictators to revise their strategy (fairness pays more than greed when avarice is fined). So in the ABC game we’d expect to see high punishment by Third Party players for unequal splits and, anticipating this, Dictators would be more likely to offer more equal shares (punishing ‘sharing norm’ violators in this way helps maintain cooperation within groups in which people obey the norm of punishing the selfish). This prediction was fulfilled.<br /><br />But what of the other conditions? Well if social norms apply to our groups, and serve to promote cooperation within the group, then there’s little need to them to outgroup members. We should neither extended the obligations we feel towards our ingroup brothers and sisters to the outgroup, nor expect them to show us the consideration they show each other. In the AB condition, the Third Party (C), being from a different group the Dictator (A) and Recipient (B), has no obligation to punish the violation of the norm for sharing if the Dictator’s offer is unfair (the punishing norm applies to other members of <span style="font-style: italic;">their </span>ingroup, to promote cooperation within <span style="font-style: italic;">their </span>own group), and no interest in doing so either (if this act of punishment induces the Dictator to be more generous in future, that benefit accrues to the Third Party’s outgroup). A similar logic applies to the AC and BC groups: in both cases, the presence of the outgroup would seem to reduce the propensity to punish (in the AC condition, the Third Party (C), seeing that the Recipient (B) is an outgroup member, does not expect the Dictator (A) to apply the sharing norm to the Recipient, and so would not punish; in the BC condition, the Third Party player does not expect the Dictator to obey the sharing norm for a similar reason).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/1600/ParochialAltruismFig1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/400/ParochialAltruismFig1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />The findings of the Bernhard <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. study don’t quite fit in with these predictions. Firstly, the same general pattern of punishment in response to unfair behaviour was the same across all conditions: people were more likely to punish as the split became increasingly unequal (to the Recipient’s disadvantage), and paid more to effect greater punishment the stingier the offer made by the Dictator (see figure). However, punishment was much stronger in the ABC condition than in either the AB or AC conditions.<br /><br />The real anomaly lies with the punishing behaviour in BC, which was, surprisingly and contrary to the expectation stated earlier, higher than in ABC. The difference between BC and ABC is that in the latter the Third Party is a member of the same group as the Dictator, and this fact leads to lower punishment of (or greater lenience towards) the Dictator. The level of punishment seen in ABC is perhaps a sort of baseline for within-group tolerance for norm violation, which becomes more muted (less tolerant) for outgroup members. In the AB condition, which shows weak punishment compared with ABC and BC, it’s perhaps not so much that the Third Party is cutting the Dictator more slack, but is just not interested in incurring a cost to punish a violation of a norm among to people from a different group, among people of a different group.<br /><br />So Third Parties are more lenient when the Dictator who violates a sharing norm is a member of their own group. The results also show that Third Parties are more willing to punish Dictators who violate the norms for sharing when the Recipient is an ingroup member (irrespective of the whether the Dictator is an in- or outgroup member). By asking the Dictators in the games what their subjective expectations were for receiving punishment for making low offers to Recipients, the researchers found that players expected just what happened. Another way of putting it is that people are much more protective of ‘victims’ of norm violations (in this case being offered an unfair amount) if they are from the same group as the punisher (that is, will be more likely to punish the interloping Dictator). Bernhard <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. call this differential treatment of ingroup and outgroup members, or narrowing of altruistic and protective tendencies ‘parochial altrusim’.<br /><br />The flip side of the punishing behaviour in these games is how generous people were with other players in the first place. In general, transfers were higher when Dictator and Recipient were members of the same group, which the idea of parochial altruism would suggest. And Dictators were also less likely to make a truly egalitarian share with Recipients if the Third Party was a member of the Dictator’s group: they correctly anticipated that they’d be less punished than if they made the same offer to an ingroup rather than outgroup Recipient in the presence of the same Third Party.<br /><br />The results of this study are somewhat subtle, and require a bit of getting your head around to see what they might mean. The authors make a number of points in this regard. The first is to note that in all conditions, with mixes of ingroup and outgroup members, there was at least some sharing (altruism) and some punishment (altruistic punishment). In other words, players extended egalitarian norms, even if in a sometimes diluted form, to outgroup members. This is perhaps a problem for theories that see altruism arising through the selective extinction of groups that are less cooperative, and therefore less successful in the long run. Such a process sees differing groups as competing entities, and so they not be expected to include outgroups within sphere of social norms.<br /><br />The second relates to the unexpected finding of high levels of punishment in the BC condition (even higher than ABC). Without taking into account the factors that influence the balance of cooperation and conflict between groups, this finding is puzzling. One suggestion for it is that punishing an outgroup member who harms an ingroup member might enhance the security of the ingroup by sending out the message “You mess with one of us, you mess with us all”. Just like in gang culture, groups that are known to protect their own with a swift and aggressive response confer a degree of protection on each individual member, as no would-be outgroup aggravator want to bring trouble on their own head.<br /><br />Although the difference standards to which ingroup and outgroup members were held in this study had no harmful real-world consequences, they are a reminder of how, in one another’s eyes, we are not all equal: some — our ingroup — are more equal than others . This bias, stoked by religious, political or territorial disputes, can easily lead to a moral distancing of ‘them’, and justify whatever actions are perpetrated in ‘our’ name — the consequences of which we all too frequently read about. Perhaps being aware of this potentially dangerous proclivity for parochialism in the social and moral realms, we can take steps to resist the urge and develop an expanded, more encompassing, social and moral framework.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1155679901834474492006-08-15T20:59:00.000+00:002006-08-17T12:59:10.700+00:00Punishment: A Global TourA while back <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/04/to-cooperate-or-free-ride-picking.html" target="third_party">I wrote about</a> a paper that explored the role of punishment in maintaining cooperation among unrelated people — currently one of the hottest topics in the human behavioural sciences. But like most (but certainly not all) studies on punishment and cooperation, this research was done with Western subjects in a laboratory setting. Now anthropologist <a href="http://www.anthropology.emory.edu/FACULTY/ANTJH/home.html" target="third_party">Joe Henrich</a> and colleagues have <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5781/1767" target="third_party">published a study</a> that looked at punishment and cooperation in diverse societies around the planet.<br /><br />Henrich and other economists and anthropologists have previously studied how people play economic games in these same societies, and the results suggest that a propensity to punish those who don’t cooperate with us, and instead try to rip us off, is part of human psychology. But how willing people are to punish the greedy, and the costs they’ll incur to do so, differ from society to society. The new study probes this propensity a bit further.<br /><br />The researchers collected data from more than 1,700 adults in 15 societies, which the authors claim span the full range of human production systems. Using favourites of studies on human cooperation and altruism – the Ultimatum Game (UG) and the Third-Party Punishment Game (3PPG) – the globe-trotting research team collected results that need to be explained by any theory of human altruism, whether based solely on genetic evolution or on gene-culture co-evolution.<br /><br />In the UG, two players are allotted a sum of money, say $100 (or the local equivalent). Player 1, the Proposer, is told that they will decide how the money will be split between the two players, and can make an offer anywhere between zero and $100, in $10 increments. Player 2, the Chooser, has to decide, for each potential offer ($0, $10, $20 and so on) whether they’d accept the offer. The Proposer’s actual offer is then revealed, and if the Chooser has agreed to accept an offer of that level, the money is split as agreed and the game is over. But there’s a catch: if the Chooser rejects the offer at that level, both players walk away with nothing.<br /><br />For a Chooser driven to maximise monetary gain (that is, to act in a materially self-regarding way), any offer should be accepted, as some money is better than no money. Seeing the logic of this, Proposers should offer the smallest amount possible, safe in the knowledge that this minimal offer will be snapped up.<br /><br />So a theory based on pure rationality and self-regard would say. But this isn’t how people generally act. It is well known that Proposers routinely offer up to 50% of the cash pie, and Chooses tend to reject offers below 20%. In other words, people will forgo money (which, economically, is equivalent to incurring a cost) in order to make sure that others don’t unfairly benefit (that is, in order to punish people who behave unfairly and snatch themselves an unequal slice of the pie). This needs explaining, and the underlying reasons for this behaviour need to be incorporated into a larger theory of human cooperation, altruism and self-regard.<br /><br />So behaviour in the UG is a measure of whether people willing to engage in costly punishment, and because there are only two players in the game Henrich <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. call this second-order punishment. In all of the populations studied, the degree to which people were willing to impose second-order punishment on another player increased as the proposed offer became more unequal – or more unfair, in common parlance. As the offers decreased from 50% to 0%, so too did the likelihood of accepting the offer. Overall, 56% of players rejected offers of 10% or less.<br /><br />But this general trend masks much variation. In five populations — the Amazonian Tsimane, the Shaur of the Andes, an Isanga village, the Yasawa in Fiji and the Sambu in Kenya — just 15% of people rejected these low offers. At the other end of the spectrum, in four societies — Maragoli in Kenya, Gusil (?), rural Missouri (USA) and the Sursurunga in New Ireland — more than 60% rejected the same offers. Surprisingly, and in contrast to the behaviour of Western students (one of the study populations), 6 of the 14 non-student populations rejected unbalanced offers <span style="font-style: italic;">that were biased in their favour</span> (offers above 50%). This is, <span style="font-style: italic;">prima facie</span>, puzzling, and the rejection of such hyper-fair offers also needs to be explained by an adequate theory of human altruism.<br /><br />Statistical analyses carried out by the authors revealed that the variation in behaviour in the UG across populations could not be explained by demographic or economic differences between them – we’ll get to what might in a moment. But before doing so, we should look at what was found with the other game, the Third-Party Punishment Game.<br /><br />The 3PPG is basically like the UG with someone watching, but with some important differences. A pot of money is provided, half of which goes to the Watcher. As before, the Proposer decides on what to offer the Chooser. While the Chooser decides (in private) on the level at which they’ll accept and reject, the Watcher is asked to decide whether to pay 10% of the total stake (20% of their own pile) to punish the Prosper for the full range of possible offers — so the Watcher may say, “Anything less than 40% ($40) and I’ll punish”. This is how the punishment works. Let’s say that the Proposer offered $30 (and the Chooser accepts). Then the Watcher would punish the Proposer, and pay 10% ($10) to do so. This $10 buys the Watcher a ‘30% cost’ on the Proposer, so if there offer was accepted by the Chooser, they’d walk away with $70 minus 30%, or $49. The Watcher would walk away with $50 (their original stake) minus the $10 ‘punishment fee’, or $40, and the Chooser would get their $30.<br /><br />What should a rational, self-regarding Watcher do in the 3PPG? Well, it would never make sense to punish a Proposer who made an unfair offer, as you’d always lose money this way, and never. But again, this isn’t how people act, and seem prepared to wage what Henrich <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. call third-order punishment. Overall, 60% of Watchers were willing to pay 20% of their endowment (which in these games represented half a day’s wages) to punish Proposers who offered nothing at all. And yet again there was variation: this figure dropped to ~28% among Tsiamne and Hadza (Tanzania) populations, and rose to more than 90% among the Gusil and Maragoli populations). Another statistical analysis suggested that these differences, like those in the UG, were not attributable to demographic/economic factors.<br /><br />The authors also looked at behaviour in one final game, one that measured a propensity towards altruism and fairness, rather than punishing behaviour: the Dictator Game. This is the same as the UG except that Choosers in fact have no choice; they’re mandatory Accepters. Knowing this, and being therefore relieved of the threat of spiteful rejections by genuine Choosers, ‘offers’ by Proposers tend to be lower.<br /><br />Taken the results together, what do they tell us about altruism, cooperation and punishment? Well, one theory of the origins of human altruism is that it’s the product of a co-evolutionary process involving genes (and the minds they help build) and culture and the social rules they prescribe. Social norms for punishing cheats can co-evolve with a psychological propensity to engage in punishing behaviour, and as a consequence stabilise cooperation (because people want to avoid the costs of being punished, and so play ball).<br /><br />If this were true, then we’d expect to see that altruistic behaviour would correlate with punishing behaviour – and the results collected by Henrich <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>. support this. In general, societies with high degrees of punishment also tend to harbour greater altruism.<br /><br />Whether or not the gene-culture co-evolutionary model turns out to be correct, these sorts of real-world studies, and the results the produce, constrain and inform all theories of human altruism, and therein lies perhaps their greatest value.Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1155675515318062142006-08-15T20:57:00.000+00:002006-08-15T20:58:35.330+00:00It’s been a long time….I’ve had a bit of a break from blogging while I concentrated on a few other things, but I’m back on board again, and plan to make regular updates as before, although I’m sure you all managed just fine without PSOM for a while!Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1147347461365034012006-05-11T11:36:00.000+00:002006-07-17T03:56:07.283+00:00Cool siteJust a short post to let you know about a <a href="http://www.reitstoen.com/multimedia.php" target="third_party">cool site </a>I found with links to many talks and radio shows featuring the likes of Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer, and also to say that despite the dearth of posts on this blog recently I haven’t quit – just been a bit distracted. More substantial posts will be reappearing shortly I hope!Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1146666368006946502006-05-03T14:23:00.000+00:002006-05-03T14:27:13.016+00:00Daddy, what did YOU do in the War on Evolution?A friend of mine who publishes Macmillan’s popular science books passed this onto me. It’s a poster by Michael Stebbins, the author of a recently published Macmillan book (<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403993424/qid%3D1146665992/202-7418825-8284627" target="third_party"><span style="font-style: italic;">Sex, Drugs and DNA</span></a>):<br /><br /><a href="http://www.macmillanscience.com/poster.htm" target="third_party">http://www.macmillanscience.com/poster.htm</a>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692041.post-1145789699300259202006-04-23T10:46:00.000+00:002006-04-23T11:21:02.190+00:00To cooperate or free-ride: picking the right pond<span style="font-style: italic;">Cooperation can get off the ground when people can punish cheats, and a new study shows that people choose environments that allow punishment over ones in which cheats go free.</span><br /><br />Why do people get together and cooperate? Why do people not ruthlessly pursue their own selfish ends in a battle ‘red in tooth and claw’ in which only the fittest survive? One obvious answer is that cooperation –working as a team, contributing your fair share to a group project – can produce results unattainable through solo effort. Group living has many potential benefits. But cooperative groups are constantly under threat from cheats that want to exploit the system for their own ends – and if enough people do this, the benefits of cooperation come crashing down. A <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5770/108?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=rockenbach&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT" target="third_party">new study in <span style="font-style: italic;">Science</span></a> by <a href="http://www.uni-erfurt.de/mikrooekonomie/guererk.htm" target="third_party">Özgür Gürerk</a> and colleagues, along with an <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;312/5770/60" target="third_party">excellent commentary</a> from <a href="http://www.anthropology.emory.edu/FACULTY/ANTJH/home.html" target="third_party">Joseph Henrich</a>, adds another piece of the puzzle of why and how people come together to form cooperative groups.<br /><br />The problem of altruism and cooperation has long been a puzzle for evolutionary biology, and has given rise to a number of competing and complementary theories. Two of the most well known – William Hamilton’s theory of kin selection (directing help to kin), and Robert Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism (scratching the back of those who scratch yours) – explain much of the cooperation we see in the animal world. Kin-directed altruism is the most ubiquitous type of altruism, although surprisingly few solid examples of reciprocal altruism have been found among animals [1] (reciprocity (perhaps not in the form of direct reciprocal altruism) does, however, seem to be an important feature of <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/03/conditions-of-kindness_13.html" target="third_party">human cooperation and altruism</a>).<br /><br />But when it comes to explaining human altruism these theories fall short of the mark. Humans direct help towards unrelated individuals in a scale unparalleled by any other species, and cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals, so kin selection is not really of much relevance here. And theoretical studies suggest that reciprocal altruism cannot stabilise cooperation in large groups. The scale and diversity of human cooperation requires something beyond these two explanations [2].<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Public spirit</span><br />One type of cooperative endeavour that has been explored in great detail is the ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game" target="third_party">public-goods game</a>’. These games are designed to reflect public-goods dilemmas in the real world. A public good is anything which everyone can benefit from equally, such as clean air and rivers, or the National Health Service in the UK (which is at least in principle a public good!). The provision of public goods, such as generating sufficient funding for public broadcast stations, is often the product of collective action, and yield a benefit for everyone regardless of whether or not they contributed to the public good. Public-goods dilemmas arise because of an inherent tension in providing public-goods that results from the logic of collective actions. When you make an effort to recycle your waste, you’re contributing to a public good (a cleaner planet) that your neighbours benefit from as much as you do, even if they don’t recycle. Everyone wants this public good, and so has a motivation to contribute to its provision. But there is also a strong temptation to not bother going to the effort of recycling. So long as enough other people are contributing to produce the desired public good, you can direct your energy elsewhere in pursuits that benefit just yourself (or, in the case of donating to public radio/TV, spend your money on something else). This temptation to cheat, or free-ride, however, threatens to unravel the whole cooperative endeavour. If everyone adopts this logic, no one will contribute and you can kiss goodbye to the public good. So that’s the catch.<br /><br />In spite of the problem of free-riding, groups of people do in fact cooperate - people do recycle, contribute to public broadcasts stations, donate blood, pay taxes and so on. Public-goods dilemmas have been brought into the lab and studied as games, and have confirmed common-sense observations that humans do have a propensity to cooperate - but only under certain conditions.<br /><br />Public-goods games usually take the following form. A group of, say, 20 players are each given 20 monetary units (MU) by a benevolent experimenter. The players are then given the choice to contribute as many or few MU as they wish to a common pot, while keeping the rest for their private account. The MU in the pot are then counted up, and the experimenter, playing the role of banker, adds a proportion of the total in the common pot (perhaps doubling it). The common pot is then split up equally among the players, regardless of how much or little each player put in. So the maximum ‘profit’ can be made if everyone puts in all their chips, which in my example is doubled and then split (20 x 20 = 400; 400 x 2 = 800 = 40 MU per person after dividing). Such behaviour is a form of cooperation because it enables the group to achieve the best outcome possible (the highest profit for the group as a whole), and this benefit is shared among everyone. However, for profit-maximising individuals the best outcome would be for everyone else to contribute all of their MU and to contribute nothing themselves (19 x 20 = 380; 380 x 2 = 760 = 38 MU per person, plus the 20 the free-rider kept by not contributing, totalling 58 MU).<br /><br />This game can be played round after round to see whether cooperation reigns, evaporates or never emerges at all. And it can also be tweaked in interesting way to reveal wrinkles on the face of cooperation. One crucial feature that can be added is the ability of players to punish free-riders. As in the game above, players get a stash of MU and contribute (or not) to a pot that is multiplied by some fixed percentage and then split evenly among all players. Then the crucial extra step is added. Each player receives information about what the others players contributed in the round (this can be done anonymously to explore (or eliminate) the role of reputation in public-goods games) – what they contributed and what they earned. Players then have the opportunity to punish people by imposing fines on them, but at a cost to themselves. Typically, For instance, a player might be able to impose a fine on another player of 3 MU at a cost to himself of 1 MU from his private account.<br /><br />It turns out that when people have the opportunity to punish, they grab hold of it with both hands [3]. People don’t punish indiscriminately; they tend to punish free-riders or cheats – and take pleasure from it (this has been assessed both psychologically and <a href="http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/01/neuroeconomics-pleasure-of-other.html" target="third_party">neurologically</a>). This has the effect of making it costly to free-ride and more attractive to cooperate, and public-goods games with punishment options can stabilise high levels of cooperation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The power of punishment</span><br />Punishment in public-goods games raises further questions though. Although it makes sense to cooperate when there are punishers about, why bother to punish free-riders in the first place? Exercising the option to punish does not come for free. The punisher incurs a cost that non-punishing cooperators do not pay, but yet who nonetheless benefit from the higher levels of cooperation promoted by punishing acts. This kind of punishment has therefore been called altruistic punishment (altruistic to the group, not to the punished player, obviously!). Altruistic punishment seems to be a feature of human cooperation, but why do people do it?<br /><br />In recent years, the idea of ‘strong reciprocity’ has gained increasing theoretical and empirical support as an explanation of the human tendency to cooperate with cooperators and to punish cheats. A strong reciprocator is an individual that “responds kindly to actions that are perceived to be kind and hostily toward actions that are perceived to be hostile” [4]. Modelling studies have shown that under certain conditions strong reciprocity can evolve and do well in competition with other more self-regarding strategies (that is, those that aim to provide the most individual benefit). Indeed, strong reciprocity is what evolutionary game theorists call an ‘evolutionarily stable strategy’ (essentially a strategy that can’t be beaten when common). But the evolution of strong reciprocity is based on different mechanisms than those underlying kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Whereas kin selection and reciprocal altruism can be explained by natural selection among ‘selfish genes’ that contribute to altruistic behaviour (and which are therefore examples of genetic evolution), the evolution of strong reciprocity is couched in terms of gene-culture co-evolution and cultural group selection (not biological gene selection).<br /><br />This is why the definition of a strong reciprocator given above refers to norms – rules of social conduct that can differ from cultural group to cultural group. Different cultural groups can differ in their social norms on a wide range of issues, such as appropriate dress, rules of conduct with peers and acquaintances, and food rituals, as well as notions of fairness, justice, and right and wrong. (In public-goods games, people are punished for violating the fairness norm “contribute to public goods from which you’ll benefit”.) A society’s norms are not only stored in the minds of its people; they are also embodied in the institutions of the society, such as religious systems of belief, educational policies and practices, and government. The role of institutions, and the norms they sustain, are therefore likely to be an important part of the puzzle of human cooperation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Institutionalised cooperation</span><br />The elegant new study by Özgür Gürerk, <a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IIM/whosWho/Irlenbusch.htm" target="third_party">Bernd Irlenbusch</a> and <a href="http://www.uni-erfurt.de/mikrooekonomie/rockenbach.htm" target="third_party">Bettina Rockenbach</a> illuminates the effects of different institutions on cooperative behaviour, and more specifically how enabling people to choose the type of institution they are part of aids the evolution of cooperation. Gurerk and colleagues used the tried-and-tested public-goods game, but added a twist. A pool of 84 players were recruited for the study, in which they played 30 ‘rounds’ of the public-goods game, with three stages to each round. The novel aspect of this study came in the first stage, in which players could choose whether to play in a setting in which free-riding (defined in this study as contributing 5 MU or less in a round) went unpunished, or choosing one in which free-riders could be penalised by fellow players (that is, a condition in which players could exercise altruistic punishment). These different sets of rules can be thought of as basic ‘institutions’ (obviously of a narrow kind); Gürerk and colleagues call the condition in which punishing is possible the sanctioning institution (SI) and the punishment-free condition, quite reasonably, the sanction-free institution (SFI).<br /><br />After choosing whether to play in SI or SFI, the game went as usual: the players contributed or not, and then the common pot was multiplied by a fixed percentage, and the MU divided out among the players (there was one common pot for the SI group and another for the SFI group – the MU were pooled and divided only within groups, not between groups. So one group could do better on a collective and per capita basis). In the SI condition, but not in SFI, players had the opportunity to punish. At the end of each round - after the MU had been counted up, multiplied, and doled out and players had received anonymous information about the behaviour of the other players - each player could impose a sanction on anyone else in the group. These sanctions could be either positive or negative. A positive sanction cost 1 MU to ‘award’ 1 MU to another player, and a negative sanction cost 1 MU to impose a 3 MU fine on another player. (In SI, after the money had been divided out, players just carried on with the next round.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/1600/table1.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/320/table1.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/1600/F1.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/400/F1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>I’ve summarised some of key results in the table above (other trends and data are shown in the figures to the left and below). The results from the beginning were pretty straightforward: roughly one-third of players pick SI and the remaining two-thirds pick SFI. This might to be taken as an indication that most people have a propensity towards selfishness, and want to at least keep the option of free-riding open. In this study, the choice of institution was also related to how players behaved in the first round (that is, how cooperative (how much they contributed) or selfish (free-riding) they were). In SI, the average contribution in the initial round was 12.7 MU, but only 7.3 MU in SFI; and whereas nearly half of the players in SI contributed 15 MU or more (‘high contributors’), just over 10% were so inclined in SFI (see figure to the left). The incidence of free-riding tells the same story: whereas almost half of the players in SFI hitched a free-ride (43.4%), less than one-fifth did so in SI (16.1%). The majority of players initially opted for an institution in which punishment of free-riding was not a possibility, and then made little more than half of the monetary contribution of the minority who opted for a punishing institution (perhaps because they planned to contribute highly and to therefore expected to avoid punishment).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/1600/F2.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/400/F2.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Cooperation does not seem to be the order of the day, and it seems unlikely that it would get off the ground given this inauspicious start. What’s worse, selfish free-riders initially do really well in SFI (averaging 49.7 MU in the first round). Perhaps even more depressingly, the higher average contribution of 12.7 MU made by players in SI (compared with 7.3 MU in SFI) does not yield a higher average payoff in the first round (38.1 in SI compared with 44.4 MU in SFI; see table). However, free-riding in SI is significantly less attractive than in SFI because many players in SFI impose fines on free-riders. And this has important consequences.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/1600/F3.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6335/2083/400/F3.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>As in previous studies, without the threat of punishment hanging over their heads many people succumb to the temptation to free-ride in SFI. More people free-riding means less people contributing, which means that there’s even less reason to cooperate and contribute because other people are not doing likewise– a vicious cycle that leads to the unravelling of cooperation and a plummeting of contributions. By contrast, contributions in SI gradually increase, and free-riding drops (because of the cost of being punished). But remember the twist in this study: at the beginning of each round players choose whether to player in SI or SFI. So what happened after the initial split of one-third of players into SI and the other two-thirds into SFI?<br /><br />Despite being initially wary of leaving SFI to join SI, by the end of the experiment nearly every player had switched to SI (92.9% by the end of the game) and was cooperating fully. At the same time, contributions in SFI steadily decreased until they hit rock bottom. The average contribution in round 30 of the experiment, the final round, brings home the difference in behaviours cultivated in SI and SFI: 19.4 MU in SI, compared with nothing in SFI.<br /><br />The different ‘life histories’ of SI and SFI provide some clues about why people migrate from SFI to SI (despite initial aversion). One potential factor is imitation of successful players – those who gain the greatest payoff. Overall, players in SI do best (average over all rounds in SI = 18.3, and 2.9 in SFI), and so the policy of copying the most successful could explain why players eventually migrate from SFI to SI.<br /><br />At the beginning of the experiment, however, free-riders in SFI are the most successful players (they reap the greatest rewards), and so imitation should lead to an increase in free-riders in the next round. In fact, this is just what was seen in round 2. But as time passes and SFI sees a decline in cooperative behaviour (because of the prevalence of free-riders), things change and selfishness starts to become self-defeating. From round 5 onwards, high contributors in SI earned more than free-riders in SFI. So imitation of successful players would then promote greater migration from SFI to SI – and again, this is what was seen. What’s more, players moving from SFI to SI tended to switch from free-riding to cooperation (as if they were maximising their payoff). Institutions, in other words, affect behaviour.<br /><br />This is seen even more clearly when players behaviour on moving institution is examined in more detail. On migrating from SFI to SI, 80.3% of players increased their contribution in two consecutive rounds, and 27.1% have something of a ‘St. Paul moment’ on the Damascene road to SI, and switch from free-riding to full cooperation! Conversely, 70% of players reduce their contribution when leaving SI for SFI, and 20% switch from full cooperation to free-riding. As they say, when in Rome…<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The wisdom of crowds</span><br />Imitation can explain some of the migratory behaviour of players from SFI to SI. Indeed, so too might rational choice approaches – players might be working out which is the best strategy, and then following the optimal strategy. These explanations face a problem, however: they don’t account for why players switching to SI why they adopt the strategy of strong reciprocators and then punish other free-riders and low contributors. The most successful strategy, from a selfish, self-regarding perspective, would be to contribute at a high level (and therefore avoid damaging punishment) but to avoid incurring the costs of punishing others. What actually happened in the experiment is that 62.9% of players adopted the punishment norm immediately after switching from SFI to SI. If contributing in the first place is a public good (because everyone benefits from it), then carrying the cost of punishing free-riders is a ‘second order’ public good: everyone else benefits from the higher level of contributions that the punisher induces, while the punisher shoulders the cost of punishing-. That is why it is called altruistic punishment.<br /><br />There is yet another potential mechanism that could explain these results, one that features prominently in theories of cultural evolution, and gene-culture co-evolution: conformist transmission. Cultural information can be passed on in a number of ways – people can imitate those of high prestige or status, in the hope of picking up the skills, behaviour or knowledge that led to their elevated position. Alternatively, individuals can simply adopt or copy the most prevalent forms of behaviour or knowledge – conform to the norms of society, in other words. And humans certainly do conform. In a famous experiment published in 1951, Solomon Asch showed how people will often over-ride their own opinions and express a belief more in tune with a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments" target="third_party">group consensus</a>. Theoretical studies have since shown how conformist transmission of cultural norms can be a powerful force in cultural evolution.<br /><br />In this study, as players switched from SFI to SI, so too did their behaviour. However, this isn’t explicable through simple imitation or payoff maximisation. However, a propensity to conform to the prevailing norms of the institution that you find yourself in can explain this behaviour. In a head-to-head competition between an institution that maintains norms of punishment of free-riders against one that doesn’t (which this study created), not only do people end up doing better in the SI group, but the whole group does better than SFI. In any case, the cost of following the punishment norm steadily decreases because the threat of punishment means that is there not much free-riding, and therefore not much need (or cost) to punish. So following such prosocial norms as punishing cheats carries only a marginal cost compared with self-centred norms.<br /><br />The demonstration that the nature of institutions governing the way cooperation and punishment is regulated, and that the role of choice of institution favours those regimes that are more conducive to cooperation, sets the stage for a number of further questions to be explored. Joe Henrich mentions two in his commentary on this research: “What happens if switching institutions is costly, or if information about the payoffs in the other institution is poor? Or, what happens if individuals cannot migrate between institutions, but instead can vote on adopting alternative institutional modifications?”. Answering such questions might help in the design of institutions that foster cooperation on scales from the local to the global, and provide clues about what determines whether certain norms and institutions spread.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Notes</span><br />1. Hammerstein, P. Why is reciprocity so rare in social animals? A Protestant appeal. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation</span> (ed. Hammerstein, P.) 83-93 (MIT Press, 2003).<br /><br />2. See, for example, <span style="font-style: italic;">Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation</span> (MIT Press, 2003) and <span style="font-style: italic;">Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Lif</span>e (MIT Press, 2005).<br /><br />3. <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6868/abs/415137a.html" target="third_party">Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. Altruistic punishment in humans. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">415</span>, 137-140 (2002).</a><br /><br />4. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. The economics of strong reciprocity. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life</span> (eds Gintis, H., Bowles, S. Boyd, R. & Fehr, E.) 151-191 (MIT Press, 2005).</span>Dan Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06415109075865745592noreply@blogger.com0