The Domesticated Brain (30 page)

Research with Cyberball reveals how easy it is to induce social pain but why should social exclusion be painful? Most pain reactions are to warn the body that damage has taken place or is about to take place. One idea is that social isolation is so damaging that we have evolved mechanisms to register when we are in danger of being ostracized.
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This registers as pain to trigger a set of coping mechanisms to reinstate ourselves back into the social situation that threatens to expel us. As soon as it becomes clear that we are in danger of being ostracized, we activate social ingratiating
strategies. We become extra helpful, going out of our way to curry favour with individuals within the group. We can become obsequious, agreeing and sucking up to others even when they are clearly in the wrong.

This is the initial response to ostracism, but if the reintegrating strategies fail, then a much more sinister, darker set of behaviours can appear. For many, the attempts to rejoin the group are replaced by aggression against the group. This aggression has been studied experimentally in a version of Milgram’s shock experiment where participants believed that they were administering painful noise. Participants were asked to select an initial level of noise that ranged from 0dB to 110dB to be administered to other subjects. Prior to making their selection, they were told that increasing levels were more uncomfortable and 110dB was the maximum level. When some subjects, who in reality were experimenter confederates, rejected the real participant in a sham ostracism scenario prior to the test, he or she wreaked revenge by administering more painful sound bursts in retaliation to the others.
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If the participant did not perceive the others as a group, they administered lower painful bursts.

Sometimes victims can be entirely innocent. In another ostracism experiment, rejected individuals spiked the food of the next participant in the study with unpleasant hot sauce even when they knew they were innocent.
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It is the experimental equivalent of the displacement aggression when someone kicks their dog out of spite when things have gone wrong elsewhere in their lives. For many, aggression seems to be a way of getting back at an unjust world when they feel
they have been injured by the thoughts and actions of others. For a few, this impulse towards revenge can be taken to the ultimate extreme.

The ultimate act of spite

Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only if you did not fuck the living shit out of me … Ask yourself what you did to me to have made me clean the slate.’

Cho Seung-Hui’s ‘manifesto’, describing his subsequent
shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University

For many, the worst thing in the world is being rejected by others – kicked out, cut off, blackballed, sent to Coventry, unfriended. It doesn’t matter how it is done. They are all ways of being ostracized. To be excluded by others is psychological death.

Exclusion is also a form of non-physical bullying, and it can sometimes have devastating consequences. In the US, the Center for Disease Control has estimated that around 4,600 children between the ages of ten and fourteen years commit suicide every year.
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Teenage bullying is associated with depression, loneliness and suicidal thoughts.
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Although the direct link between bullying and suicide remains to be established, contemplating killing oneself is considered a major risk factor. It is not always the physical aspects of bullying that are so detrimental, but rather the social exclusion that it usually entails. A Dutch study of nearly 4,811 schoolchildren aged between nine and thirteen years of age found
that social isolation was more harmful than physical violence for both boys and girls.
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Given the choice, teenagers would rather be hit than excluded as those who had experienced both forms of bullying reported that social aggression made them feel worse.
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What makes these findings all the more shocking is that many teachers do not regard social exclusion as being as bad as physical bullying. In other words, not only is it difficult to monitor or police because it may go on largely unnoticed by teachers, but they can also be more tolerant of it.
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Rejection can also be accompanied by that other toxic thought, humiliation – ridicule and mocking by the group. No one can easily tolerate the public destruction of one’s self worth, because that would make life worthless. When people feel they have been humiliated, some will wreak terrible revenge. If they do not turn the aggression in on themselves with suicide, a few will direct it back at others. They ‘go postal’ – a reference to the spate of US postal workers who murdered former colleagues in rampages during the 1990s.

Rampage killings are the consequences of social rejection taken to the ultimate extreme. One analysis
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of school mass shootings such as Virginia Tech and Columbine revealed that in thirteen out of the fifteen cases, the perpetrators had been socially excluded, as illustrated so shockingly in the quote from the Virginia Tech manifesto. Others simply try to hurt society as much as possible. In the Dunblane school massacre, Thomas Hamilton targeted the most innocent victims – children – as retribution against the adults who questioned his suitability as a Scout troop leader in charge
of children. In letters to the press, the BBC and even the Queen, he spelled out his resentment at his dismissal from the Scouts, which had festered for twenty-five years amidst rumours and accusations that he was a pervert, leading to his ridicule by the community. We do not yet know enough about the Sandy Hook atrocity of 2012, but gunman Adam Lanza clearly acted to inflict as much suffering as possible, and again on children. What sort of disturbed individuals could care so little about the hurt they brought to others?

One could argue that it is not that these murderers did not care about others, but rather they cared too much. They cared more about what other people thought about them than they did for the lives of their victims, their families and ultimately themselves. These atrocities were deliberate sabotage in order to be noticed. In their disturbed minds, these murderers thought they were getting even with an unjust world.

Most of us lead relatively normal lives without the extremes of ostracism and violence, but we all know what it feels like to be excluded. Even in the absence of extreme exclusion, we still lead our lives seeking the approval of others and, in doing so, maybe we all care just a little too much. Almost everything that we do is motivated by what others think, and how we are being judged.

If you ask most people about ambitions and goals, they will talk about success – something that many want but few can attain. Success is defined by what other people think. Even success in terms of material wealth and possessions has this curious aspect. We want more money to buy more of the trappings of success so that we can have status within the
group. Non-material success, such as fame or infamy, is again defined by what others think. Every author writes in the hope that he or she will be read by many. Every painter wants his or her work to be appreciated. Every singer or actor wants an audience. Every politician needs support. Even the solitary rampaging gunman is motivated by what others think.

We have reached a point in our civilization where many want to be famous for the sake of just being famous, irrespective of how they go about it. There is some deep compulsion in most of us to be noticed by the group. When a small child is crying out to his parents, ‘Look at me, Look at me!’, they are declaring one of the fundamental needs when it comes to being human – the need for attention. That childhood urge never really goes away as we grow up into adults seeking the attention of others because they validate our existence.

The need for attention is the bittersweet twist to domestic life. Most children are raised in a nurturing environment that breeds dependency on others. Initially that dependency addresses all the physical and emotional needs that our long childhoods engender. It is a time when we learn how to become members of the groups that surround us, but when we eventually grow up to attain a level of independence, acceptance and inclusion as adults, most of us remain bound in a continual cycle of seeking approval from others. Almost everything we do is done with a view to how others will perceive us. That quest provides both the joys and the miseries of being a social animal.

People spend time together for a number of reasons. We may have family commitments and most of us work alongside colleagues. There are also few places on this planet where one can escape the presence of others entirely. But whether we have no choice or we actively seek out the company of others, we always prefer to be liked by the groups that we join.

Likeability depends very much on what qualities the group decides are admirable. The psychologist Richard Nisbett has argued that different cultures value different ways of behaving in groups and indeed perceive the social world differently in terms of the relatedness of individuals and groups.
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In Eastern traditions, members of a group are interdependent and see themselves not so much as individuals but as a collective team working for the common good. This interdependence stems all the way from the family to the workplace to the whole of society. In contrast, Westerners are much more likely to consider themselves as individuals and value those who achieve success even when that comes at a cost of trampling on others on the way up to the top. Asians take great pleasure from participating in and succeeding as a group, whereas Westerners tend to take
greater pride in individual achievements. Such an individualistic approach would be considerable extremely rude by most traditionalists from the East. As Nisbett points out, in Chinese there is no word for ‘individualism’, with the word that comes closest being one that corresponds to ‘selfishness’.

Ultimately, whether collective or individualistic, validation in any culture only really exists in the minds of others. It is not enough that I believe my achievements to be a success, but rather they have to be recognized as successful by the group. This deep-seated need to be valued by the group arises because of our domesticated brains. Our success depends on acceptance from the people who inhabit our social landscape, the one that is shaped during our development. However, that landscape is now destined to change in ways that could never have been predicted.

Throughout this book, we have considered the nature of human development, both within the individual and across the evolution of our species, as a progression towards greater domestication. This I define as the related skills of coordination, cooperation and cohabitation with others, based on what is considered acceptable behaviour. Other animals have some of these attributes of coexistence as well, but no other animal has taken domestication to the extent that we have. Rudiments of coordination, cooperation and cohabitation must have existed in our species from the very beginning, when hominids became socially dependent on one another hundreds of thousands of years ago. Each of these social skills required a brain capable of perceiving others in terms of who they are, what they want, what they are thinking and,
in particular, what are they thinking about me? Coordination enabled many to work together for more than could be achieved by the individual working alone. Cooperation was a spur to help each other on the understanding that there would be reciprocal benefits down the road. Cohabitation provided safety and security in numbers as well as the change in our species from a nomadic to a sedentary domesticated life.

So what does the future hold for this domesticated life? We are currently living through one of the most transformative periods in human history. Every so often a new technology comes along that changes the way we behave. The raft was a significant invention as it enabled groups of early humans to migrate across oceans to new territories. The plough played a critical role in the birth of agriculture that spurred the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary existence that is the basis for modern domestic living. Gunpowder and steel changed the way certain groups conquered and subjugated other peoples.
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Printing enabled humans to spread knowledge and create our education systems.

The invention of the Internet will go down as another significant milestone in the evolution of human civilization. It is an unprecedented system for exchanging information and conducting business, but it is the social revolution the Internet has created that is probably the most unforeseen consequence of this technology. Not so long ago, we may have spent most of our time actually in the presence of others, but that was before the Internet infiltrated almost every household in the West. With around 1.73 billion
subscribers, nearly one in four people on the planet currently uses social networking sites (SNS), with a forecast of 2.55 billion users by 2017.
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It seems inevitable that eventually the majority of the human race will be online, engaging in social exchanges. For the first time in the history of our species, each one of us has the potential capability to interact with anyone else on the planet in real time but within a virtual environment. We have come a long way from the small band of early hominids living in small numbers on the African savannah, exchanging gossip within our group. The social skills that we evolved for interacting with each other are now brought to bear in situations where we communicate with not just a handful but hundreds and sometimes thousands of others over vast distances in any time zone from the comfort of our homes.