The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (136 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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The pattern for the two sexes was revealing. When the willpower of the participants was fresh, men and women didn’t differ: both were resistant to imaginary cheating. When their wills had been weakened, the women were just as resistant, but the men imagined themselves likely to stray. Another sign that gallantry requires self-control came from an analysis that simply compared people who reported having a lot or a little self-control (ignoring momentary ego depletion). Among those with high self-control, neither the men and nor the women imagined cheating on their partners, but among the people with low self-control, the men imagined that they probably would. The pattern suggests that the exercise of self-control hides a deep difference between men and women. Freed from their own willpower, men are more likely to act as evolutionary psychology predicts.
Baumeister and Gailliot pushed their luck in one more experiment, aiming to show that self-control affects real, not just imagined, sexual activity. They invited couples into the lab who were either sexually experienced or just beginning their relationship, separated them, gave them an ego depletion task (concentrating on a boring video while shutting out distractions), reunited them, and invited them to be affectionate with each other for three minutes while the experimenter discreetly left the room. A sense of propriety prevented the experimenters from videotaping the couple or observing them from behind a one-way mirror, so they asked each partner to write a confidential paragraph describing exactly what had gone on between them. Experienced couples, if their wills had been depleted, were a bit
less
physical, as if sex had switched from a passion to a chore. But ego depletion made the inexperienced couples far more physical. According to the write-up, “They kissed open-mouthed for prolonged periods of time, groped and caressed each other (e.g., on the buttocks and woman’s chest), and even removed articles of clothing to expose themselves.”
less
physical, as if sex had switched from a passion to a chore. But ego depletion made the inexperienced couples far more physical. According to the write-up, “They kissed open-mouthed for prolonged periods of time, groped and caressed each other (e.g., on the buttocks and woman’s chest), and even removed articles of clothing to expose themselves.”
According to the theory of the Civilizing Process, a dearth of self-control in medieval Europe underlay many forms of dissoluteness, including slovenliness, petulance, licentiousness, uncouthness, steep discounting of the future, and most important, violence. The science of self-control vindicates the idea that a single capability of mind can counteract many of these forms of dissipation. But it remains to be shown that violence is one of them. We know that people with less self-control are more cantankerous and trouble-prone. But can manipulating self-control in an experiment bring out the beast within?
No one wants a fight to break out in the lab, so Baumeister went to the hot sauce. Hungry participants were asked to take part in a study on the relation between tastes in food and written expression.
116
They indicated their favorite and least favorite flavors, wrote an essay expressing their views on abortion, rated the essay of a bogus fellow participant, rated the taste of a food, and finally read their partner’s feedback on their essay. In the taste test, half of them had to rate the taste, texture, and aroma of a donut; half had to rate the taste, texture, and aroma of a radish. But just as they raised the stimulus to their mouth, the experimenter exclaimed, “Wait! I’m sorry; I think I screwed up. This isn’t for you. Please don’t eat the rest of it. Let me go figure out what’s supposed to be next.” He then left the participant alone with the donut or the radish for five minutes. Lest there be any doubt that this was a valid test of self-control, one may note the following passage in the write-up:
116
They indicated their favorite and least favorite flavors, wrote an essay expressing their views on abortion, rated the essay of a bogus fellow participant, rated the taste of a food, and finally read their partner’s feedback on their essay. In the taste test, half of them had to rate the taste, texture, and aroma of a donut; half had to rate the taste, texture, and aroma of a radish. But just as they raised the stimulus to their mouth, the experimenter exclaimed, “Wait! I’m sorry; I think I screwed up. This isn’t for you. Please don’t eat the rest of it. Let me go figure out what’s supposed to be next.” He then left the participant alone with the donut or the radish for five minutes. Lest there be any doubt that this was a valid test of self-control, one may note the following passage in the write-up:
Participants:
Forty undergraduates participated in this study in exchange for course credit. Data from seven participants were discarded from all analyses, four due to expressed suspicion about the feedback and three due to participants having eaten the entire donut.
The participants then read the partner’s feedback on their essay, which was scathing. They also were shown his or her taste preferences, which indicated a dislike of spicy foods. And then they were asked to prepare a snack for the partner from a bag of chips and a container of hot sauce prominently labeled
SPICY
. The amount they applied was measured by weighing the container after they left. The participants were also asked to rate their moods, including anger. The ones whose self-control had been depleted by having to forgo the donut didn’t get mad, but they did get even. They applied 62 percent more hot sauce to the chip of their insulting partner, presumably because they could not resist the impulse for revenge. Will-depleted subjects were also more likely to torment a critic by leaning on a button to blast him with an air horn every time he made an error in a computer game.
SPICY
. The amount they applied was measured by weighing the container after they left. The participants were also asked to rate their moods, including anger. The ones whose self-control had been depleted by having to forgo the donut didn’t get mad, but they did get even. They applied 62 percent more hot sauce to the chip of their insulting partner, presumably because they could not resist the impulse for revenge. Will-depleted subjects were also more likely to torment a critic by leaning on a button to blast him with an air horn every time he made an error in a computer game.
Another study tapped aggressive fantasies by asking participants to imagine standing at a bar with a beloved girlfriend when a rival shows up and begins to flirt, to her visible enjoyment. (In the scenario given to women, it was a boyfriend who was chatted up by a rival woman.) The participant imagines confronting the rival, who responds by shoving him into the bar. Close at hand is a beer bottle. The participant was asked: “How likely would you be to smash the bottle on the person’s head? Indicate your response on a scale from -100 (not at all likely) to 100 (extremely likely).” The participants who were low in self-control, if their wills were ready and rested, indicated they probably would not retaliate. But if their wills had been depleted, they indicated they probably would.
If we combine (1) Baumeister’s experiments, which found that reducing self-control in the lab can increase tendencies toward impulsive sex and violence; (2) the correlations across individuals between low self-control on the one hand and childhood misconduct, dissolute behavior, and crime on the other; (3) the neuroimaging studies that showed correlations between frontal lobe activity and self-control; and (4) the neuroimaging studies showing correlations between impulsive violence and impaired frontal lobe function, then we get an empirical picture that supports Elias’s conjecture that violence may be caused by weakness in an overarching neural mechanism of self-control.
The picture is still incomplete. The existence of a trait that is stable in an individual over a span of decades, and that can be depleted over a span of minutes, cannot explain how a society can change over a span of centuries. We still need to show that whatever level of self-control a person is born with, he or she has ways to boost it. There is no paradox in the possibility that self-control can both be heritable across individuals and rise over time. That is exactly what happened with stature: genes make some of us taller than others, but over the centuries everyone got taller.
117
117
For as long as people have reflected on self-control, they have reflected on ways to enhance it. Odysseus had his sailors tie him to the mast and plug their ears with wax so he could hear the alluring song of the sirens without steering his ship onto the rocks. Techniques in which the present self handicaps the future self are sometimes called Odyssean or Ulyssean in his honor. There are hundreds of examples.
118
We avoid shopping on an empty stomach. We throw out the brownies or the cigarettes or the booze at a time when we aren’t craving them, to foil ourselves at a time when we are. We put our alarm clock on the other side of the bedroom so we don’t turn it off and fall back asleep. We authorize our employers to invest a part of every paycheck for our retirement. We refrain from buying a magazine or a book or a gadget that will divert our attention from a work project until it is complete. We hand over money to a company like
Stickk.com
that returns it a fraction at a time if we meet certain goals, or donates it to a political organization we detest if we don’t. We make a public resolution to change, so our reputation takes a hit if we don’t.
118
We avoid shopping on an empty stomach. We throw out the brownies or the cigarettes or the booze at a time when we aren’t craving them, to foil ourselves at a time when we are. We put our alarm clock on the other side of the bedroom so we don’t turn it off and fall back asleep. We authorize our employers to invest a part of every paycheck for our retirement. We refrain from buying a magazine or a book or a gadget that will divert our attention from a work project until it is complete. We hand over money to a company like
Stickk.com
that returns it a fraction at a time if we meet certain goals, or donates it to a political organization we detest if we don’t. We make a public resolution to change, so our reputation takes a hit if we don’t.
As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table. The familiar sign in the saloons in old Westerns—“Check your guns at the door”—served the same purpose, as do gun control laws and disarmament agreements today. Another tactic is to keep oneself away from trouble, such as avoiding the place where an aggrieved rival is known to hang out. Brawlers who allow themselves to be pulled apart by bystanders avail themselves of a similar tactic, with the added bonus that they have not conceded weakness or cowardice by disengaging.
Other strategies of self-control are mental rather than physical. Walter Mischel showed that even four-year-olds can wait out a long interval for a double helping of marshmallows if they cover the alluring marshmallow in front of them, look away from it, distract themselves by singing, or even reframe it in their minds as a puffy white cloud rather than a sweet tasty food.
119
An equivalent in the case of violence may be the cognitive reframing of an insult from a devastating blow to one’s reputation to an ineffectual gesture or a reflection on the immaturity of the insulter. Such reframing lies behind advice like “Don’t take it personally,” dismissals like “He’s just blowing smoke,” “He’s only a kid,” and “Take it from whom it comes,” and proverbs like “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.”
119
An equivalent in the case of violence may be the cognitive reframing of an insult from a devastating blow to one’s reputation to an ineffectual gesture or a reflection on the immaturity of the insulter. Such reframing lies behind advice like “Don’t take it personally,” dismissals like “He’s just blowing smoke,” “He’s only a kid,” and “Take it from whom it comes,” and proverbs like “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.”
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, invoking the economists’ theory of optimal interest rates and the biologists’ theory of optimal foraging, have suggested a third way in which self-control can be manipulated. They propose that organisms are equipped with an internal variable, like an adjustable interest rate, that governs how steeply they discount the future.
120
The setting of the variable is twiddled according to the stability or instability of their environment and an estimate of how long they will live. It doesn’t pay to save for tomorrow if tomorrow will never come, or if your world is so chaotic that you have no confidence you would get your savings back. In a quantitative comparison of neighborhoods in a major city, Daly and Wilson found that the shorter the expected life span (from all causes other than violence), the higher the rate of violent crime. The correlation supports the hypothesis that, holding age constant, people are more reckless when they have fewer years of unlived life at risk. A rational adjustment of one’s discounting rate in response to the uncertainty of the environment could create a vicious circle, since your own recklessness then figures into the discounting rate of everyone else. The Matthew Effect, in which everything seems to go right in some societies and wrong in others, could be a consequence of environmental uncertainty and psychological recklessness feeding on each other.
120
The setting of the variable is twiddled according to the stability or instability of their environment and an estimate of how long they will live. It doesn’t pay to save for tomorrow if tomorrow will never come, or if your world is so chaotic that you have no confidence you would get your savings back. In a quantitative comparison of neighborhoods in a major city, Daly and Wilson found that the shorter the expected life span (from all causes other than violence), the higher the rate of violent crime. The correlation supports the hypothesis that, holding age constant, people are more reckless when they have fewer years of unlived life at risk. A rational adjustment of one’s discounting rate in response to the uncertainty of the environment could create a vicious circle, since your own recklessness then figures into the discounting rate of everyone else. The Matthew Effect, in which everything seems to go right in some societies and wrong in others, could be a consequence of environmental uncertainty and psychological recklessness feeding on each other.
A fourth way people in a society might boost their self-control is by improving their nutrition, sobriety, and health. The frontal lobe is a big slab of metabolically demanding tissue with an outsize appetite for glucose and other nutrients. Pushing the metaphor of self-control as physical effort even further, Baumeister found that people’s blood glucose level plummets as their ego is depleted by an attention-consuming or a willpower-demanding task.
121
And if they replenish their glucose level by drinking a glass of sugar-sweetened lemonade (but not a glass of aspartame-sweetened lemonade), they avoid the usual slump in the follow-up task. It is not implausible to suppose that real-world conditions that impair the frontal lobes—low blood sugar, drunkenness, druggedness, parasite load, and deficiencies of vitamins and minerals—could sap the self-control of people in an impoverished society and leave them more prone to impulsive violence. Several placebo-controlled studies have suggested that providing prisoners with dietary supplements can reduce their rate of impulsive violence.
122
121
And if they replenish their glucose level by drinking a glass of sugar-sweetened lemonade (but not a glass of aspartame-sweetened lemonade), they avoid the usual slump in the follow-up task. It is not implausible to suppose that real-world conditions that impair the frontal lobes—low blood sugar, drunkenness, druggedness, parasite load, and deficiencies of vitamins and minerals—could sap the self-control of people in an impoverished society and leave them more prone to impulsive violence. Several placebo-controlled studies have suggested that providing prisoners with dietary supplements can reduce their rate of impulsive violence.
122
Baumeister stretched the metaphor even farther. If willpower is like a muscle that fatigues with use, drains the body of energy, and can be revived by a sugary pick-me-up, can it also be bulked up by exercise? Can people develop their raw strength of will by repeatedly flexing their determination and resolve? The metaphor shouldn’t be taken
too
literally—it’s unlikely that the frontal lobes literally gain tissue like bulging biceps—but it’s possible that the neural connections between the cortex and limbic system may be strengthened with practice. It’s also possible that people can learn strategies of self-control, enjoy the feeling of mastery over their impulses, and transfer their newfound tricks of discipline from one part of their behavioral repertoire to another.
too
literally—it’s unlikely that the frontal lobes literally gain tissue like bulging biceps—but it’s possible that the neural connections between the cortex and limbic system may be strengthened with practice. It’s also possible that people can learn strategies of self-control, enjoy the feeling of mastery over their impulses, and transfer their newfound tricks of discipline from one part of their behavioral repertoire to another.
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