Just Babies (5 page)

Real psychopaths give answers that are much the same. The psychologist William Damon recounts a
New York Times
interview of
a thirteen-year-old mugger who viciously attacked elderly victims, including a blind woman. He showed no remorse for his actions, commenting that it made sense to target blind people because they couldn’t identify him later. When the mugger was asked about the pain he had caused the woman, the reporter wrote, “The boy was surprised at the question and responded: ‘What do I care? I’m not her.’ ”
Ted Bundy was puzzled about all the fuss over the murders he committed: “I mean, there are so many people.”
The serial killer Gary Gilmore summed up the attitude of someone without moral feelings: “I was always capable of murder.… I can become totally devoid of feelings of others, unemotional. I know I’m doing something grossly fucking wrong. I can still go ahead and do it.”

Or consider this
interview with Peter Woodcock, who had raped and murdered three children as a teenager. After decades in a psychiatric facility, he was given a three-hour pass to wander the grounds unsupervised. During this period he invited another patient, a close friend of his, to join him in the woods, and then killed him with a hatchet.

Interviewer:
What was going through your mind at the time? This was someone you loved.

Woodcock:
Curiosity, actually. And an anger. Because he had rebuffed all my advances.

Interviewer:
And why did you feel someone should die as a result of your curiosity?

Woodcock:
I just wanted to know what it would feel like to kill somebody.

Interviewer:
But you’d already killed three people.

Woodcock:
Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.

C
ONTRAST
these disturbing portraits with the moral sentiments that arise during a normal childhood.
Some illustrative examples are reported by Charles Darwin in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” published in 1877 in the prestigious philosophy journal
Mind.
Darwin had read an article about child development in the same journal, and this motivated him to look over the notes he had collected thirty-seven years earlier when observing the development of his son William, a boy that he proudly described as “a prodigy of beauty & intellect.”

The diaries first recorded physical reactions (“sneezing, hiccuping, yawning, stretching, and of course sucking and screaming were well performed by my infant”), but reports of what Darwin described as “the moral emotions” soon followed. By the first half year of his life,
William responded to the perceived suffering of others: “With respect to the allied feeling of sympathy, this was clearly shown at six months and eleven days by his melancholy face, with the corners of his mouth well depressed, when his nurse pretended to cry.” Much later on, Darwin noted
William’s satisfaction at his own kind actions: “When 2 years and 3 months old, he gave his last bit of gingerbread to his little sister, and then cried out with high self-approbation ‘Oh kind Doddy, kind Doddy.’ ” Four months after that were the
first hints of guilt and shame: “I met him coming out of the dining room with his eyes unnaturally bright, and an odd unnatural or affected manner, so that I went into the room to see who was there, and found that he had been taking pounded sugar, which he had been told not to do. As he had never been in any way punished, his odd manner certainly was not due to fear, and I suppose it was pleasurable excitement struggling with conscience.”

Two weeks later, Darwin wrote, “I met him coming out of the same room, and he was eyeing his pinafore which he had carefully rolled up; and again his manner was so odd that I determined to see what was within his pinafore, notwithstanding that he said there was nothing and repeatedly commanded me to ‘go away,’ and I found it stained with pickle-juice;
so that here was carefully planned deceit.”

We see in young William the battle between good and evil that typifies everyday life. Normal people often behave quite badly if they believe that they won’t be held accountable for their actions, and we can all use some occasional reining in when faced with pounded sugar, pickles, and other temptations. But it’s clear as well that conscience emerges at an early age to help us resist those urges. Indeed, in many instances, we don’t need the threat of punishment to be good, because acting selfishly or cruelly can be inherently unpleasant. One example of this comes from a study in the 1930s that asked questions such as
“How much money would it take for you to strangle a cat with your bare hands?” The average answer was $10,000—about $155,000
in today’s dollars. The same individuals required only half as much money to agree to have one of their front teeth pulled out.

But a psychopath would do it for much less. Indeed, if he felt like strangling a cat, he might do so for free—so long as there was nobody watching, because he would probably be smart enough to know that this would upset people and that the resulting ostracism and punishment would get in the way of other goals that he wished to pursue. The repugnance that normal people have toward cat strangling just wouldn’t be there.

Now, many novels, movies, and television shows portray psychopaths as better than the rest of us in certain regards—intimidating, charming, and successful, like the cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter or the lovable serial killer Dexter Morgan. Some psychologists and sociologists believe that
psychopathy can be an asset in business and politics and that, as a result, psychopathic traits are over-represented among successful people.

This would be a puzzle if it were so. If our moral feelings evolved through natural selection, then it shouldn’t be the case that one would flourish without them. And, in fact, the successful psychopath is probably the exception. Psychopaths have certain deficits. Some of these are subtle. The psychologist Abigail Marsh and her colleagues find that psychopaths are markedly insensitive to the expression of fear. Normal people recognize fear and treat it as a distress cue, but psychopaths have problems seeing it, let alone responding to it appropriately. Marsh recounts an anecdote
about a psychopath who was being tested with a series of pictures and who failed over and over again to recognize fearful expressions, until finally she figured it out:
“That’s the look people get right before I stab them.”

Other deficits run deeper. The overall lack of moral sentiments—and specifically, the lack of regard for others—might turn out to be the psychopath’s downfall. We non-psychopaths are constantly assessing one another, looking for kindness and shame and the like, using this information to decide whom to trust, whom to affiliate with. The psychopath has to pretend to be one of us. But this is difficult. It’s hard to force yourself to comply with moral rules just through a rational appreciation of what you are expected to do. If you feel like strangling the cat, it’s a struggle to hold back just because you know that it is frowned upon. Without a normal allotment of shame and guilt, psychopaths succumb to bad impulses, doing terrible things out of malice, greed, and simple boredom. And sooner or later, they get caught. While psychopaths can be successful in the short term, they tend to fail in the long term and often end up in prison or worse.

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take a closer look at what separates psychopaths from the rest of us. There are many symptoms of psychopathy, including pathological lying and lack of remorse or guilt, but the core deficit is indifference toward the suffering of other people. Psychopaths lack compassion.

To understand how compassion works for all of us non-psychopaths, it’s important to distinguish it from empathy.
Now, some contemporary researchers use the terms interchangeably, but there is a big difference between caring about a person (compassion) and putting yourself in the person’s shoes (empathy).

Adam Smith didn’t use the word
empathy
—it was coined in 1909, based on the German
Einfühlung
, meaning “feeling-into”—but he described it well: “We enter as it were into [another’s] body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” Empathy is a powerful, often irresistible, impulse. One squirms while watching a comedian embarrass herself on stage; it’s hard to keep calm next to someone who is agitated; laughter is infectious, and so are tears. A moviegoer sees James Bond struck in the testicles in
Casino Royale
and tenses in a mirrored reaction to his pain. (My bet is that this scene is particularly unpleasant for those viewers who themselves have testicles.) Describing his childhood, John Updike wrote: “My grandmother would have choking fits at the kitchen table, and
my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy.”

Empathy leads to joy in the joy of others. Our reaction to another person’s pleasure is complicated and can be tainted by jealousy—why is she having so much more fun than I am? But still, contagion of pleasure plainly exists. Look up the video on YouTube called
Hahaha
, in which a man makes odd sounds (“Plong! Floop!”) off camera while a baby in a high chair laughs hysterically in reaction. Or check out
Baby Laughing Hysterically at Ripping Paper
, which has had over 58 million views, making it more popular than sneezing pandas and farting cats. The appeal of the videos lies in
the pleasure of the babies; it leaps, as if by magic, from their heads into ours.

Adam Smith provides another example: “When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty; we enter into the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him.… We consider all the ideas which it presents rather in the light in which they appear to him … and we are amused by sympathy with his amusement.” Smith has just explained one of the greatest pleasures of the Internet: the forwarding of jokes, pictures of adorable animals, blog posts, videos, and so on. His analysis also captures one of the joys of being a parent—one gets to have certain pleasurable experiences, such as going to the zoo and eating ice cream, for the first time all over again.

There is a popular neural theory for how empathy works—
mirror neurons. Originally found in the brains of rhesus macaques, these cells fire both when a monkey watches another animal act and when the monkey itself performs the same action. They are blind to the difference between self and other, and they exist in other primates, including, most likely, humans.

The discovery of these neurons has caused quite a stir, with one prominent neuroscientist
comparing it to the discovery of DNA. Scientists are integrating mirror neurons into theories of language acquisition, autism, and social behavior, and these cells have caught the public’s attention
in the same way that neural networks did several years ago: when people discuss any interesting aspect of mental life, it’s a given that someone will eventually suggest that it can all be explained by mirror neurons.

This brings us to a simple theory of compassion: X sees Y in pain; X feels pain through the power of mirror neurons; and X wants Y’s pain to go away, because, by doing so, X’s pain will go away. Empathy, driven by mirror neurons, dissolves the boundaries between people; someone else’s pain becomes your pain; self-interest transforms into compassion. Such a theory has the promise of being reductionist in the best sense: a puzzling and important phenomenon—our caring for others—is explained in terms of a more foundational psychological mechanism—empathy—which is in turn explained by a specific mechanism in the brain.

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a lot to be said for such an elegant and clean theory. But then again, as Einstein once put it, “Everything should be as simple as possible—but no simpler.”

To start with, it is by now clear that
the initial claims about mirror neurons are significantly overblown. Mirror neurons can’t be sufficient for capacities such as language and complex social reasoning, because macaques, who possess these neurons, don’t have language and complex social reasoning. They can’t even be sufficient for the imitation of others’ behavior, because macaques don’t imitate other macaques. Mirror neurons are in parts of the brain that are distinct from those areas involved in empathy, and many psychologists and neuroscientists think that they
most likely don’t have a social function at all but rather are specialized for the learning of motor movements—though even here there is controversy.

In any case, mirror neurons are the least interesting part of the theory. We have the capacity for empathy, and this has to emerge somehow from our brains—if not through mirror neurons, then through some other mechanism. The interesting question isn’t about neuroanatomy or neurophysiology; it’s about the role of empathy in a broader theory of moral psychology.

I am too much of an adaptationist to think that a capacity as rich as empathy exists as a freak biological accident. It most likely has a function, and the most plausible candidate here is that it motivates us to care about others. Hunger drives us to seek out food; lust inspires sexual behavior; anger leads to aggression in the face of some sort of threat—and
empathy exists to motivate compassion and altruism.

Still, the link between empathy (in the sense of mirroring another’s feelings) and compassion (in the sense of feeling and acting kindly toward another) is more nuanced than many people believe.

First, although empathy can be automatic and unconscious—a crying person can affect your mood, even if you’re not aware that this is happening and would rather it didn’t—we often choose whether to empathize with another person. I can hear about the tortures suffered by a political prisoner and, through an act of will, start to imagine (to an infinitely smaller degree, of course) what it is like to be him. I can watch someone on stage receiving an award
and choose to feel her nervousness and her pride. So when empathy is present, it may be the product of a moral choice, not the cause of it.