How We Decide (26 page)

Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, has exposed another blind spot in the sympathetic brain. His experiments are simple: he asks people how much they would be willing to donate to various charitable causes. For example, Slovic found that when people were shown a picture of Rokia, a starving Malawian child, they acted with impressive generosity. After looking at Rokia's emaciated body and haunting brown eyes, they each donated, on average, two dollars and fifty cents to the charity Save the Children. However, when other people were provided with a list of statistics about starvation throughout Africa—more than three million children in Malawi are malnourished, more than eleven million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance, and so forth—the average donation was 50 percent lower. At first glance, this makes no sense. When people are informed about the true scope of the problem, they should give
more
money, not less. Rokia's tragic story is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our minds can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. And why we donate thousands of dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover of a magazine but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. As Mother Teresa put it, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."

The capacity for making moral decisions is innate—the sympathetic circuit is hard-wired, at least in most of us—but it still requires the right kind of experience in order to develop. When everything goes according to plan, the human mind naturally develops a potent set of sympathetic instincts. We will resist pushing the man off the bridge, make fair offers in the ultimatum game, and get deeply disturbed by images of other people in pain.

However, if something goes amiss during the developmental process—if the circuits that underlie moral decisions never mature—the effects can be profound. Sometimes, as with autism, the problem is largely genetic. (Scientists estimate the heritability of autism at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, which makes it one of the most inheritable of all neurologic conditions.) But there's another way that the developing brain can be permanently damaged: child abuse. When children are molested or neglected or unloved as children, their emotional brains are warped. (John Gacy, for example, was physically abused throughout his childhood by his alcoholic father.) The biological program that allows human beings to sympathize with the feelings of others is turned off. Cruelty makes us cruel. Abuse makes us abusive. It's a tragic loop.

The first evidence for this idea came from the work of Harry Harlow.
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In the early 1950s, Harlow decided to start a breeding colony of monkeys at the University of Wisconsin. He was studying Pavlovian conditioning in primates, but he needed more data, which meant that he needed more animals. Although nobody had ever successfully bred monkeys in the United States before then, Harlow was determined.

The breeding colony began with just a few pregnant female monkeys. Harlow carefully monitored the expecting primates; after each gave birth, he immediately isolated the infant in an immaculately clean cage. At first, everything went according to plan. Harlow raised the babies on a formula of sugar and evaporated milk fortified with a slew of vitamins and supplements. He fed the monkeys from sterilized doll bottles every two hours and carefully regulated the cycles of light and dark. In order to minimize the spread of disease, Harlow never let the babies interact with one another. The result was a litter of primates that were bigger and stronger than their peers from the wild.

But the physical health of these young monkeys hid a devastating sickness: they had been wrecked by loneliness. Their short lives had been defined by total isolation, and they proved incapable of even the most basic social interactions. They would maniacally rock back and forth in their metal cages, sucking on their thumbs until they bled. When they encountered other monkeys, they would shriek in fear, run to the corners of their cages, and stare at the floor. If they felt threatened, they would lash out in vicious acts of violence. Sometimes these violent tendencies were turned inward. One monkey ripped out its fur in bloody clumps. Another gnawed off its own hand. Because of their early deprivation, these babies had to be isolated for the rest of their lives.

For Harlow, these troubled baby monkeys demonstrated that the developing mind needed more than proper nutrition. But what did it need? The first clue came from watching these primate babies. The scientists had lined their cages with cloth diapers so that the monkeys didn't have to sleep on the cold concrete floor. The motherless babies quickly became obsessed with these cloth rags. They would wrap themselves in the fabric and cling to the diapers if anybody approached the cages. The soft fabric was their sole comfort.

This poignant behavior inspired Harlow to come up with a new experiment. He decided to raise the next generation of baby monkeys with two different pretend mothers. One was a wire mother, formed out of wire mesh, while the other was a mother made out of soft terry cloth. Harlow assumed that all things being equal, the babies would prefer the cloth mothers, since they would be able to cuddle with the fabric. To make the experiment more interesting, Harlow added a slight twist to a few of the cages. Instead of hand-feeding some babies, he put their milk bottles in the hands of the wire mothers. His question was simple: what was more important, food or affection? Which mother would the babies want more?

In the end, it wasn't even close. No matter which mother held the milk, the babies always preferred the cloth mothers. The monkeys would run over to the wire mothers and quickly sate their hunger before immediately returning to the comforting folds of cloth. By the age of six months, the babies were spending more than eighteen hours a day nuzzling with their soft parent. They were with the wire mothers only long enough to eat.

The moral of Harlow's experiment is that primate babies are born with an intense need for attachment. They cuddled with the cloth mothers because they wanted to experience the warmth and tenderness of a real mother. Even more than food, these baby monkeys craved the feeling of affection. "It's as if the animals are programmed to seek out love," Harlow wrote.

When this need for love wasn't met, the babies suffered from a tragic list of side effects. The brain was permanently damaged so that the monkeys with wire mothers didn't know how to deal with others, sympathize with strangers, or behave in a socially acceptable manner. Even the most basic moral decisions were impossible. As Harlow would later write, "If monkeys have taught us anything, it's that you've got to learn how to love before you learn how to live."

Harlow would later test the limits of animal experimentation, remorselessly probing the devastating effects of social isolation. His cruelest experiment was putting baby monkeys in individual cages with nothing—not even a wire mother—for months at a time. The outcome was unspeakably sad. The isolated babies were like primate psychopaths, completely numb to all expressions of emotion. They started fights without provocation and they didn't stop fighting until one of the monkeys had been seriously injured. They were even vicious to their own children. One psychopathic monkey bit off the fingers of her child. Another killed her crying baby by crushing its head in her mouth. Most psychopathic mothers, however, just perpetuated the devastating cycle of cruelty. When their babies tried to cuddle, they would push them away. The confused infants would try again and again, but to no avail. Their mothers felt nothing.

WHAT HAPPENS TO
monkeys can happen to people. This is the tragic lesson of Communist Romania. In 1966, Nicolae Ceausescu, the despotic leader of the country, banned all forms of contraception, and the country was suddenly awash in unwanted babies. The predictable result was a surfeit of orphans; poor families surrendered the kids they couldn't afford.

The state-run orphanages of Romania were overwhelmed and underfunded. Babies were left in cribs with nothing but plastic bottles. Toddlers were tied to their beds and never touched. The orphanages lacked heat in the winter. Children with disabilities were consigned to the basement, and some went years without seeing natural light. Older children were drugged so that they would sleep for days at a time. In some orphanages, more than 25 percent of the children died before the age of five.

The children that managed to survive the Romanian orphanages were permanently scarred. Many had stunted bodies, shrunken bones, and untreated infections. But the most devastating legacy of the orphanage system was psychological. Many of the abandoned children suffered from severe emotional impairments. They were often hostile to strangers, abusive to one another, and incapable of even the most basic social interactions. Couples that adopted Romanian orphans from these institutions reported a wide array of behavioral disorders. Some children cried whenever they were touched. Others stared into space for hours and then suddenly flew into violent rages, attacking everything within reach. One Canadian couple walked into the bedroom of their three-year-old son to discover that he had just thrown their new kitten out the window.

When neuroscientists imaged the brain activity of Romanian orphans, they saw reduced activity in regions that are essential for emotion and social interaction, such as the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala. The orphans also proved unable to perceive emotions in others and had a pronounced inability to interpret facial expressions. Finally, the neglected children showed significantly reduced levels of vasopressin and oxytocin, two hormones crucial for the development of social attachments. (These hormonal deficiencies persisted for years afterward.) For these victims of abuse, the world of human sympathy was incomprehensible. They struggled to recognize the emotions of others, and they also found it difficult to modulate their own emotions.

Studies of American children who are abused at an early age paint a similarly bleak picture. In the early 1980s, the psychologists Mary Main and Carol George looked at a group of twenty toddlers from "families in stress." Half of these children had been victims of serious physical abuse. The other half were from broken homes—many of them were living with foster parents—but they hadn't been hit or hurt. Main and George wanted to see how these two groups of disadvantaged toddlers responded to a crying classmate. Would they display normal human sympathy? Or would they be unable to relate to the feelings of their peer? The researchers found that almost all the nonabused children reacted to the upset child with concern. Their instinctive sympathy led them to make some attempts to console the child. They were upset by seeing somebody else upset.

Childhood abuse, however, changed everything. The abused toddlers didn't know how to react to their distressed classmate. They occasionally made sympathetic gestures, but these gestures often degenerated into a set of aggressive threats if the other child didn't stop crying. Here is the study's description of Martin, an abused two-and-a-half-year-old: "Martin ... tried to take the hand of the crying other child, and when she resisted, he slapped her on the arm with his open hand. He then turned away from her to look at the ground and began vocalizing very strongly. 'Cut it out! cut it out!,' each time saying it a little faster and louder. He patted her, but when she became disturbed by his patting, he retreated, hissing at her and baring his teeth. He then began patting her on the back again, his patting became beating, and he continued beating her despite her screams." Even when Martin wanted to help, he ended up making things worse. An abused two-year-old named Kate exhibited a similar pattern of behavior. At first she reacted with tenderness to the distressed child and gently caressed him on the back. "Her patting, however, soon became very rough," the researchers wrote, "and she began hitting him hard. She continued to hit him until he crawled away." Because Kate and Martin couldn't understand the feelings of someone else, the world of human interaction had become an impenetrable place.

What these abused children were missing was an education in feeling. Because they had been denied that influx of tender emotion that the brain is built to expect, they were seriously scarred, at least on the inside. It's not that these kids wanted to be cruel or unsympathetic. They were simply missing the patterns of brain activity that normally guide our moral decisions. As a result, they reacted to the toddler in distress just as their abusive parents reacted to their own distress: with threats and violence.

But these tragic examples are exceptions to the rule. We are designed to feel one another's pain so that we're extremely distressed when we hurt others and commit moral transgressions. Sympathy is one of humanity's most basic instincts, which is why evolution lavished so much attention on mirror neurons, the fusiform face area, and those other brain regions that help theorize about other minds. As long as a person is loved as a child and doesn't suffer from any developmental disorders, the human brain will naturally reject violence and make fair offers and try to comfort the crying child. This behavior is just a basic part of who we are. Evolution has programmed us to care about one another.

Consider this poignant experiment: six rhesus monkeys were trained to pull on a variety of chains to get food. If they pulled on one chain, they got a large amount of their favorite food. If they pulled on a different chain, they got a small amount of a less enticing food. As you can probably guess, the monkeys quickly learned to pull on the chain that gave them more of what they wanted. They maximized their reward.

After a few weeks of this happy setup, one of the six monkeys got hungry and decided to pull on the chain. This is when something terrible happened: a separate monkey in a different cage was shocked with a painful jolt of electricity. All six monkeys saw it happen. They heard the awful shriek. They watched the monkey grimace and cower in fear. The change in their behavior was immediate. Four of the monkeys decided to stop pulling on the maximizing chain. They were now willing to settle for less food as long as the other monkey wasn't hurt. The fifth monkey stopped pulling on either chain for five days, and the sixth monkey stopped pulling for twelve days. They starved themselves so that a monkey they didn't know wasn't forced to suffer.