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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Three - Elephants Rule
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p55 In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.” Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feelings that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).
Wundt said that affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is. (Note 8: See LeDoux 1996 on how the amygdala can trigger an emotional reaction to something well before the cerebral cortex has had a chance to process the event.) These flashes occur so rapidly that they precede all other thoughts about the thing we’re looking at. You can feel affective primacy in action the next time you run into someone you haven’t seen in many years. You’ll usually know within a second or two whether you liked or disliked the person, but it can take much longer to remember who the person is or how you know each other.
In 1980 social psychologist Robert Zajonc... revived Wundt’s long-forgotten notion of affective primacy... He did a number of ingenious experiments that asked people to rate arbitrary things such as Japanese pictograms, words in a made-up language, and geometric shapes. It may seem odd to ask people to rate how much they like foreign words and meaningless squiggles, but people can do it because almost everything we look at triggers a tiny flash of affect. More important, Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times. The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the “mere exposure effect,” and it is the basic principle of advertising.
p56 In a landmark article, Zajonc urged psychologists to use a dual-process model in which affect or “feeling” is the first process. It has primacy both because it happens first (it is part of perception and is therefore extremely fast) and because it is more powerful (it is closely linked to motivation, and therefore it strongly influences behavior). The second process -- thinking -- is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation. In other words, thinking is the rider; affect is the elephant. The thinking system is not equipped to lead -- it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen -- but it can be a useful advisor.
Zajonc said that... affective reactions are so fast and compelling that they act like blinders on a horse: they “reduce the universe of alternatives” available to later thinking. The rider is an attentive servant, always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move. If the elephant leans even slightly to the left, as though preparing to take a step, the rider looks to the left and starts preparing to assist the elephant on its imminent leftward journey. The rider loses interest in everything off to the right.
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p59 ...[Alex Todorov] collected photographs of the winners and runners-up in hundreds of elections for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. He showed people the pairs of photographs from each contest with no information about political party, and he asked them to pick which person seemed more competent. He found that the candidate that people judged more competent was the one who actually won the race about two-thirds of the time. People’s snap judgments of the candidate's physical attractiveness and overall likability were not as good predictors of victory, so these competence judgments were not just based on an overall feeling of positivity. We can have multiple intuitions arising simultaneously, each one processing a different kind of information.
And strangely, when Todorov forced people to make their competence judgments after flashing the pair of pictures on the screen for just a tenth of a second -- not long enough to let their eyes fixate on each image -- their snap judgments of competence predicted the real outcomes just as well. Whatever the brain is doing, it’s doing it instantly, just like when you look at the Muller-Lyer illusion.
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p61 Moral judgement is not a purely cerebral affair in which we weigh concerns about harm, rights, and justice. It’s a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they move through the world, feeling themselves drawn toward or away from various things. Moral judgement is mostly done by the elephant.
Psychopaths Reason But Don't Feel
Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths. [I thought this terminology went out of favor.] Most are not violent, but the ones who are commit nearly half of the most serious crimes... Robert Hare, a leading researcher, defines psychopathy by two sets of features. There’s the usual stuff that psychopaths do -- impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood -- and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals. [I wish he would compare them with nature in general, but I guess that isn’t Haidt’s interest.]
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Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others. [Just like nature.] (Note 32 - Brain scanning studies confirm that many emotional areas, including the amygdala and the vmPVC, are much less reactive in psychopaths than in normal people; see Blair 2007; Kiehl 2006. If you hook them up to a skin conductance meter, as in a lie detector test, psychopaths show a normal response to a photograph of a shark with open jaws. But show them a picture of mutilated bodies or suffering children, and the meter doesn’t budge....) The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice...
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Babies Feel But Don’t Reason
p63 Psychologists used to assume that infant minds were blank slates. The world babies enter is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” as William James put it, and they spend the next few years trying to make sense of it all. But when developmental psychologists invented ways to look into infant minds, [you can tell when something surprises them] they found a great deal of writing already on that slate.
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Using this trick [seeing what surprises babies], psychologists discovered that infants are born with some knowledge of physics and mechanics: they expect that objects will move according to Newton’s laws of motion, and they get startled when psychologists show them scenes that should be physically impossible (such as a toy car seeming to pass through a solid object)...
But when psychologists dug deeper, they found that infants come equipped with innate abilities to understand their social world as well. They understand things like harming and helping.
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I’m skipping the puppet show with “helping” and “hindering” puppets, but here’s the conclusion.
p64 A few minutes later, the infants saw a new puppet show. This time the climber... decided to cozy up to the hinderer. To the infants, that was the social equivalent of seeing a car pass through a solid box; it made no sense, and the infants stared longer than when the climber decided to cozy up to the helper.
At the end of the experiment, the helper and hinderer puppets were placed on a tray in front of the infants. The infants were much more likely to reach out for the helper... they clearly wanted the nice puppet. The researchers concluded that “the capacity to evaluate individuals on the basis of their social interactions is universal and unlearned.”
...these findings suggest that by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean. In other words, the elephant begins making something like moral judgments during infancy. long before language and reasoning arrive....
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p65 ... you’ve probably heard of the famous “trolley dilemma” in which the only way you can stop a runaway trolley from killing five people is by pushing one person off a bridge onto the track below.
Philosophers have long disagreed about whether it’s acceptable to harm one person in order to help or save several people. Utilitarianism is the philosophical school that says you should always aim to bring about the greatest total good, even if a few people get hurt along the way, so if there’s really no other way to save those five lives, go ahead and push. Other philosophers believe that we have duties to respect the rights of individuals, and we must not harm people in our pursuit of other goals, even moral goals such as saving lives. This view is known as deontology (from the Greek root that gives us our word duty), Deontologists talk about high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of gut feelings. But [Joshua] Greene had a hunch that gut feelings were what often drove people to make deontological judgments, whereas utilitarian judgments were more cool and calculating.
I’m skipping his clever experiments.
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p66 ... the results tell a consistent story: the areas of the brain involved in emotional processing activate immediately, and high activity in these areas correlates with the kind of moral judgments or decisions that people ultimately make.
In an article titled “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” [playing with Kant’s categorical imperative, here] Greene did not know what E. O. Wilson had said about philosophers consulting their “emotive centers” when he wrote his article, but his conclusion was the same as Wilson’s:
We have strong feeling that tell us in clear and uncertain terms that some things simply cannot be done and that other things simply must be done. But it’s not obvious how to make sense of these feelings, and so we, with the help of some especially creative philosophers, make up a rationally appealing story {about rights}.
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Elephants Are Sometimes Open To Reason
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p68 When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges.
But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. [TV would seem to play a role here, as well.] The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants... or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants... [and here we see the growth of Islamic State and similar cults.]
Paxton and Greene devise a new version of the incest story study but this time they present the subjects with two supporting arguments for the incest being OK. One argument is weak and one is strong. (I thought they were both rather weak.) The Harvard student subjects at first seemed to agree with me and rejected both arguments to the same degree. But then they altered the experiment by giving subjects two minutes before they could declare their judgments. With the delay, subjects were more tolerant.
p69 ... The delay allowed the rider to think for himself and to decide upon a judgement that for many subjects was contrary to the elephant’s initial inclination.
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I’m reminded of the est event I attended. After a reasonable amount of time spent with a warm and supportive group of est members, we outsiders were sent away to hear the actual pitch. Then there was a “break” during which several people were signed up and so became insiders. Finally, after the break, we were urged to join... now, no time to lose, offer only good for the next several minutes.
I was only there to see how it worked, so I didn’t feel under any pressure to join the friendly elephants, but I could see that other people were. And of course, once they leaned in the direction of joining, their riders would find abundant justifications for the decision.
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p71 Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.
Upon further review, I’m now thinking that this elephant and rider analogy is close to, and undoubtedly related to, Persig’s software application running on top of an Operating System; but it isn’t quite the same thing. Persig’s OS has an agenda and it manipulates the application to cooperate in the furthering of that agenda. It doesn’t just passively respond to outside stimuli, it alters the way the application experiences that stimuli.
Though, having said that, since the rider “experiences” the world largely through the affects of the elephant, this may actually come to the same thing. All an application can know about is what the OS chooses to reveal. The application’s reality is Phenomenological. It can have no direct, unmediated knowledge of the thing in itself.
Let’s go back to my personal version of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” our feeling of sexual attraction. It’s possible that our feelings in this regard are shaped by the (peer) elephants around us, but I have my doubts about this. While I know that some women are judged “sexy” by many others, this has no affect at all on my own taste. I’m more comfortable with the theory that this is determined by a gene propagating calculation on the part of my elephant.
What’s really impressive here is how fast this process works. As I think I’ve said before, and this is consistent with what Haidt has said here about how quickly affects are generated, I am often alerted to the presence of what I consider an attractive woman even before I see her. I somehow get a “stop what you’re doing and look to your right” interrupt message even when I’m engaged in reading or writing or whatever. I’ll admit that Haidt could be correct about my (rider) finding visual justifications for whatever it is the elephant is reacting to, though this does seem to be pretty consistent. Even if the attraction is based on obvious physical characteristics, it doesn’t answer the question why my elephant has this particular interest.
My point here is that the Persig idea gives the elephant more of a reasoning facility than does Haidt’s idea. Or maybe I’m wrong about that since Haidt did choose a very smart animal for his analogy.
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