EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (23 page)

That there are bullies, victims, victims turned bullies, bullies turned victims, and individuals who are neither bullies nor victims, showcases considerable variation in behavior and the psychology that leads to it. Common lore has it that bullies are clueless social oafs, whereas victims are geeks, short, overweight, disabled, or more generally abnormal in some way. Though some bullies are indeed social Neanderthals, while some victims are awkward or size-challenged, as I was, this crude assessment covers up a far more interesting story that has emerged from the sciences. This is a story about individual differences that, like the others I have recounted in this chapter, helps us understand why some are attracted to harming others while others are attracted to compassion, or at least non-violence
⁶³
.

The psychologist Gianluca Gini explored the moral psychology of over 700 children between the ages of 9-13 years, classified by peers and teachers into three personality types: bullies, victims, and defenders; defenders are individuals who have never bullied or been bullied, but often step in to protect the victims. All of the children read different moral scenarios and for each, judged whether the protagonist was very bad or very good, as well as how they or someone else would feel about harming or helping another. The first set of judgments focused on whether children understand that moral decisions depend upon what people believe and intend, as well as the outcomes that result from particular actions. The second set of judgments focused on whether children express compassion or empathy for others, and have a moral conscience with respect to their actions. For example, children might read a story about a boy who swings a bat at a baseball, but accidently hits another child in the head. Since the harm occurred accidentally, the boy is certainly not as bad as if he had swung intentionally. But regardless of the boy’s intent, one should empathize with the injured child, imagining what it would be like to be him and caring about his wellbeing.

Gini’s results provide a sound rejection of the social oaf explanation for bullying: bullies, along with defenders, are mature and highly competent judges of moral scenarios, piecing together information about beliefs, intentions and outcomes. Bullies recognize that a person who intentionally hits someone with a bat is morally worse than someone who does so accidentally. In contrast, victims are clueless, focused almost exclusively on outcomes: if a boy hits someone with a bat, what counts is that the person was hurt, not what the boy intended. This contrast between bullies and victims flips around when we consider the compassion and conscience side of the story: like defenders, victims express compassion and concern for those who have been hurt; bullies don’t care, and nor do they feel that others should express concern.

One reason bullies don’t care, or at least act as if they don’t, is because they frequently disengage from the moral norms that surround them. As discussed in
chapter 2
, moral disengagement is a form of denial. Morally disengaged individuals are more likely to engage in harming others as they either feel justified or feel nothing at all. As several studies now show, bullies are far more likely than victims or defenders to be morally disengaged. When bullies disengage, they are most likely to justify their aggressive actions on the basis of some
higher
morality, or to downplay their actions by pointing to more egregious ones. Either way, severing themselves from their society’s norms enables unconstrained violence.

HEADLINE: Bullies are morally competent but don’t care, victims are morally incompetent but care, and defenders are moral saints. These results showcase important individual differences, differences that I briefly alluded to in previous sections. Esse Viding’s work suggests that early in life, some children are extremely callous and unemotional, showing little compassion or empathy toward others. Some of these children maintain this personality characteristic into adulthood, exhibiting all of the traits of psychopathy, including cold, calculating, cruelty. Not only do these individuals lack empathy, but they don’t care about the consequences of their own or others’ actions. The important point here is that the lack of empathy is not sufficient to explain anti-social and especially violent and harmful actions. When bullies or psychopaths strike out and harm others, not only are their feelings for others flattened, so too is their concern for what others value, including life itself.

The reason I have emphasized the distinction between the capacity for empathy and the capacity to care is because of a tendency to assume that individual differences in empathy, including the virtual lack of empathy in some, is what accounts for the most significant cases of gratuitous cruelty. It’s easy, so the argument goes, to torture others if you have no compassion, no feeling of what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, suffering. I have no doubt that a person with flattened empathy is capable of excessive harm. But flattened empathy isn’t sufficient to explain the variety of ways in which humans engage in gratuitous cruelty, nor can it explain why some without this emotional capacity are perfectly peaceful and kind.

In Simon Baron-Cohen’s recent treatment of the science of evil, empathy functionally runs the argument. Baron-Cohen makes the important point that although individuals clinically diagnosed with psychopathy and autism are often classified as such due to their lack of empathy, these two disorders result in extremely different behavioral profiles. Psychopaths have no difficulty understanding what others believe, want and intend. In fact, they are extremely good at it, which is what makes them dangerous. Knowing what others will feel and what they want, allows psychopaths to manipulate their victims, putting them in a state of fear often before ending their lives. The psychopath’s problem is not so much that they lack empathy, but that they don’t care about others and have an impoverished capacity to control their actions. If you don’t care about others’ emotions and values and lack self-control, you are not only morally disengaged but free to do as you please. Here, desire and denial have run amuck due to significant problems of brain function. In contrast, for those who suffer from autism, their lack of empathy is coupled with a lack of understanding of others’ beliefs, desires and intentions, but violence does not follow. In contrast with the psychopathic condition, the autistic mind can and does express compassion for others. Autistics care in a way that psychopaths don’t. Lack of empathy is therefore not sufficient to explain cruelty in either the pathological case or, I suggest, the normal case.

When we turn to cases where apparently healthy people commit gratuitous acts of cruelty, the lack of empathy not only fails to fully account for their behavior, but the argument is actually backwards: many evildoers recognize what counts as pain and suffering, have well developed empathy when it comes to their family members and friends, but explicitly develop tactics to maximize the suffering and fear experienced by others outside their inner circle. These individuals know what it is like to live in a state of fear, often because they or their relatives lived through something like this. When I described the Shawnee massacre in the last chapter, I was not describing a group of people who lacked empathy. They undoubtedly expressed it in the context of other Shawnee Indians. But when they attacked the Greathouse family it was revenge — a brutal response to having their own people massacred. When the Serbian leaders plotted their genocide, they developed an explicit plan to inject the greatest fear into Croats and Muslims, knowing what it is like to sit and watch as spouses are raped and children are brutalized. But those who carry out these atrocities are not zeroed out on the empathy scale. They have empathy, but choose to use it selectively. They have empathy but choose not to care in certain situations. Though there are numerous reasons why they don’t care, they typically link to cases of revenge, the feeling — imagined or real — that they are in danger, or because selfish desires have enabled a psychology of denial that facilitates gratuitous acts of cruelty.

The boiling point

We begin life with differences in our biology, differences that place constraints on who we are and who we can become. Nothing in our biology fixes or predetermines our destiny, but as numerous studies show, differences in genetic constitution can both limit or enhance our potential for change as we grow older and interact with our culture. This variation feeds the process of natural selection and is thus directly relevant to our evolution, both its historical past and potential future. It is directly relevant to our understanding of each individual’s potential for carrying out acts of gratuitous cruelty.

What is particularly striking is the observation that some of the biological differences that start each of us off in life are stubbornly resistant to modification by experience, though certainly not immune. As discussed, our capacity as young children to fend off the temptation to eat one marshmallow in favor of a future bounty predicts our salaries, physical health, drug abuse, and criminal records. Similarly, our stress response as children to an obnoxious sound sets up the odds of our committing a crime. The predictive power of these measures reveals that our biology has a remarkably strong grip on future outcomes. This perspective has important implications: what should we do with the knowledge that some children start out life with a high probability of harming others as well as themselves? What do we do with the fact that some children are closer to the boiling point than others? Not intervening seems irresponsible, while intervening seems risky given that we can’t predict with certainty that a child who grabs the marshmallow immediately and is relaxed in response to an obnoxious sound will, with complete certainty, turn out to be a low income, unhealthy, drug abusing criminal. As much of this research suggests, the early warning signs are just that, signals to caretakers that children are at-risk and should be both monitored and nurtured.

Esse Viding and James Blair’s research on the callous-unemotional personality dimension provides important insights into this applied issue. Those children with this personality trait are not only cold, uncaring and often aggressive, but like adult psychopaths, are also insensitive to punishment. Like adult psychopaths, young children with the callous-unemotional profile often repeat morally inappropriate actions despite a history of being punished for such actions. And like adult psychopaths, they also fail to shift their strategies in a laboratory game where different choices are associated with rewards as opposed to penalties: unlike emotionally healthy children, these children continue to make choices associated with penalties and thus, end up losing the game. One explanation for this pattern of results, shared among children and adults, is that a flattened emotional profile reduces the effectiveness of punishment. When healthy children and adults do something wrong and are punished for it, punishment hurts, bringing with it feelings of guilt and shame. For the callous-unemotional child and the adult psychopath, the emotional connection is severed. Not only is there no fear or anxiety about doing the wrong thing and being punished for it, there is functionally no awareness of the problem at all. The lack of emotions enables moral disengagement. Morally disengaged, living in a constant state of denial, their desires operate without constraint. Harming others leaves them cold. These results suggest both that early diagnosis is critical and that punishment is unlikely to work as an intervention. Though no one has yet worked out a procedure to transition children from callous and unemotional to empathic, starting early in life is the best prospect for change given the brain’s heightened plasticity.

The scientific evidence on individual differences suggests that we are born with different propensities for cruelty. These propensities did not evolve for cruelty, but rather, for different aspects of social life, including the important decisions we make to survive and reproduce. Individual differences in our capacity for self-control, experience of reward, willingness to take risks, response to stress, and ability to empathize have significant biological origins. Though it is difficult to pinpoint the original function of these capacities, they play an important role today in eating, mating, playing, defending, and killing. These differences are not noise in the system, but highly relevant to our evolutionary past and futures. Individuals who were impulsive, fearless, and aggressive were invaluable when fighting against enemy tribes, and they are valuable today in modern warfare. Individuals who were patient and anticipated great rewards from building up large cattle herds, were better able to provide for themselves and their families. But these same qualities were also deployed for less virtuous goals. Many of these cases, though despicable, are not difficult to explain once we look to individual desire to acquire or maintain power. Many of these cases are, however, more puzzling as the harm caused is extreme and seemingly unnecessary to achieve the targeted end. Some are cruel for cruelty’s sake. Some are cruel to intimidate the enemy. Individual differences push some of us toward gratuitous cruelty and others away from it, despite similarities in our upbringing and cultural norms.

Recommended Books

Baron-Cohen, S. (2011).
The Science of Evil
. New York: Basic Books.

Baumeister, R. & Tierney, J. (2011).
Willpower
. New York: Penguin Press.

Browning, C. R. (1992).
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution.
New York: Harper Collins.

Chagnon, N. (2013).
Noble Savages
. New York: Simon & Shuster.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. (2009).
Worse Than War
. New York: Public Affairs.

Jones, A. (2010).
Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction
. New York: Routledge.

Kagan, J. (2010).
The Temperamental Thread
. Boston: Dana Press.

Kiernan, B. (2007).
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.
New Haven: Yale University Press.