The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (21 page)

But there’s still an unanswered question here. Exactly why is it that the feeling of being observed sways our social behaviors so dramatically, leading us to do things that appear altruistic, or at least keeping us from doing things we otherwise might want to do? Simply knowing that you know I’m, say, an adult bed wetter, have a particularly nasty case of gonorrhea, or enjoy watching reruns of the 1980s television series
Knight Rider
every Friday night while wearing children’s racing-car pajamas might be a little embarrassing, but that in itself isn’t really enough for me to bother trying to hide these things from you. After all, my dog might
see
and therefore
know
these things about me, but that wouldn’t be too disconcerting. That you know these awkward (and, I hasten to add, fictitious) facts about me would probably make me a tad uncomfortable, but there’s one crucial additional thing that makes your knowing very different from my dog’s knowing, and that would keep me from sharing this undesirable social information about myself with you:
I realize that once you know, you’re going to tell other people.

Language. That’s the problem with being human. Without a theory of mind enabling us to think about what others know and don’t know, and without a means of communication to symbolically encode others’ mental states, events, and concepts, there’s no threat of information dissemination. Here, then, is the real crux of the matter: for every other species that currently exists or has ever existed on this earth, the specific details about what one animal knows about another is limited to what it sees firsthand. Not so, individual human beings, whose reputations precede them.

The combustive coevolution of theory of mind and language meant a game-changing development for human beings. It doesn’t matter if a particular incident happened two minutes ago or two decades ago. Once you’ve got a single witness to your actions, or someone who has otherwise come to have specific details about you, you’ve got a “carrier” of strategic information about you. And a carrier can often mean trouble, especially if it involves information about your failure to heed the warnings of the new part of your social brain. As an old Chinese proverb says, “What is told in the ear of a man is often heard a hundred miles away.”

With brains powered by a theory of mind, carriers realize that others don’t know what they know, so they can intentionally share these juicy facts with interested, absent third parties—third parties who can punish you through anything from ostracism to execution. And, if you’ll follow this reasoning through, as this communal punishment becomes publicly revealed, your public reputation deteriorates, and so also, by deductive logic, does your reproductive success. University of Edinburgh political scientist Dominic Johnson has also written on the enormity of this distinctively human evolutionary problem: “Information about person A could propagate via person B to person C, D, E and so on…even if person B and C do not care, it may not be until person Z hears the news, or until
enough
people hear the news, or until some authority hears the news, perhaps weeks later, that punishment will come.”
⁵

Through language, strategic social information (which is any information that, once exposed, could influence one’s reproductive success) could be relayed to absent third parties by witnesses’ reports, hearsay, allusion, rumor, or gossip, making the careful, thoughtful management of such details vitally important for our ancestors. Patience, restraint, modesty, humility—these are all desirable, biblically endorsable features of humanity not because they are heavenly virtues, but because they’re pragmatic. For other apes, inhibition is often illogical, especially when witnesses are only impotent, subordinate onlookers rather than dominant or physically aggressive. For us, inhibition is very often the key to our survival. Again, this is because whenever another member of our own species—anybody with a wagging tongue really—sees us doing something, anything, this person can then go and tell someone else who wasn’t there, who can tell someone else, and so on, as in the proverbial game of telephone or that figure of speech “through the grapevine.” To give but one of countless examples, Temple University psychologist Ralph Rosnow describes how unsuspecting children in western Newfoundland were once used by their parents to loiter about the Roman Catholic parish, ferrying out news to teetotaling adults about the drinking patterns of the town’s inhabitants.
⁶

The explosive consequences of carriers are highlighted in a scene from the movie
Doubt
(2008), starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. In the film, Hoffman plays an uncomfortably avuncular priest in a small Catholic diocese in the Bronx, New York. Streep’s character, a nun, is the cynical and austere principal of the attached school who comes to suspect the priest of sexually abusing a young African American boy in the church rectory. Wary of his own vulnerability to malicious rumors about the alleged molestation, the accused clergyman—whose intentions toward the boy are never confirmed (hence the title of the story)—offers the following illustrative parable in a sermon to his congregation:

Not everything is gossip worthy, of course. In fact, most behaviors aren’t. Assume that you and I are acquaintances on a cordial first-name basis. Seeing me bending over to tie my shoelaces isn’t exactly something to write home about, nor is seeing me drinking a strawberry milkshake or tripping over a slab of uneven sidewalk. But if I groped you while tying my shoelaces, dumped my milkshake on your head, or removed my belt and started disciplining that misbehaving pavement, my guess is you’d be eager to share these interesting facts about me with someone else. And if word gets out about these things, or gets out to the wrong people anyway, my social life is probably going to take a hit. Now just imagine if you had seen me doing something
really
unlawful or egregious—again, you’re limited only by your imagination.

Our compulsion to let others know whenever someone else has done something wrong or unusual appears to have an innate basis. As University of Oxford psychologist Gordon Ingram and I report in a 2010 issue of
Child Development
, almost as soon as children begin speaking, tattling to adult authority figures is rampant and almost impossible to eradicate.
⁸
By contrast, “tootling” (letting adults know when another child has done something positive) is virtually unheard of. To get kids talking positively about other kids usually requires explicit instruction from caregivers and teachers or some special incentive.

And let’s face it—even for adults, keeping a secret is hard work. You may personally be very good at keeping secrets, but consider that, in one study, 60 percent of people confessed to sharing even their best friends’ secrets with a third party. Another study found that a quarter of people shared “confidential” social information entrusted to them with at least three other people. In fact, there’s even some data to suggest that simply prefacing your secret sharing with a request for confidentiality (such as “Please keep this close to your chest” or “Just between you and me”) can actually make your confidante
more
likely to betray your trust, because you’re essentially flagging the coming information as being strategic and gossip worthy, as high-value social knowledge. Even professional therapists aren’t altogether immune to the urge to share their clients’ secrets among themselves, as several studies have revealed.
⁹

As a result of our fundamental dependence on other people, humans are extraordinarily sensitive to being ostracized. Because we have vested genetic interests, we even have to worry about other people judging us on the basis of what our friends and family are up to. The sociologist Erving Goffman noted that, not very long ago, once you were seen in the company of a questionable character you were referred to as “having smallpox,” because this person contaminated your reputation by sheer association.
¹⁰
This is, of course, the Republican ploy used against Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, in which Senator John McCain’s running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, insinuated repeatedly that Obama was “palling around” with William Ayers. Ayers, a poisonous figure in conservative circles, had been involved in a radical leftist organization in the 1970s, and Obama had served on a single education reform committee with him. It’s the whole birds-of-a-feather, peas-in-a-pod thing. In the light of this, it’s not too surprising that psychologists have discovered that we’re more likely to favor punishment of transgressors—and more severe punishment at that—when we know that there’s an audience listening to our opinions on the matter.

Things become even more complicated when the transgressor is a biological relative. Consider the case of David Dahmer, younger brother of the late Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. How does David cope with the stigma of having such a scandalous figure on the twig next to his on the family tree? We’d have a hard time asking him personally: he changed his last name, his whereabouts are unknown, and he does his best to get by living in complete anonymity. And no wonder. Having the last name Dahmer wouldn’t exactly endear you to the ladies (well, at least not any ladies you’d probably want raising your children), among other things. The truth is that David indeed carries around half of his brother’s genetic material, and although most women couldn’t tell you just why they’re turned off by the prospect of touting about in their wombs or suckling at their breasts the nephew of a necrophile who had cultivated a keen taste for the flesh of young men (aside from the fact that it creeps them out), this psychological aversion is nature’s way of telling them that Dahmer DNA is the equivalent of genetic plutonium. David’s children would likely be ostracized as well if people knew who their uncle was, so their mother’s own genetic success would be placed in peril because her offspring, and therefore carriers of her own genes, would be outcasts with an insufferable social handicap.

Is such automatic judgment being unfair to the Dahmer heirs? From a societal perspective, it’s entirely unfair. But from the amoral perspective of natural selection, whatever genetic factors played a role in their uncle becoming a headlines-grabbing psychopath may also be incubating in their own genetic material, so this social bias probably reflects a reasonable adaptive strategy.

Similarly, studies suggest that the adult children of rapists, child molesters, and alcoholics are often extraordinarily wary of confiding these dark family secrets to romantic partners, even after marriage. Of course, just because their parents did these things doesn’t mean that they themselves will inevitably end up doing the same. Quite the opposite, in most cases. But all else being equal, in the ancestral past, those who stigmatized others on the basis of their moral bloodlines would have had a leg up over those who didn’t, because doing so minimized the chances of passing on to their offspring maladaptive, heritable traits such as impulsive tendencies and various social disorders.

Previously, evolutionary psychologists tended to focus on the advantages of having language. Indeed, there were certainly many advantages to sharing our mental lives with others through symbolic communication, and today there are just as many evolutionary theories to account for them. The most relevant theory for our analysis, however, was one developed by University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar has argued that language allowed our ancestors to abandon the type of parasite-picking, hand-in-fur grooming that eats up much of the daily routine of other social primates, because chitchat does the same thing, only better (well, minus the parasite removal, but we subsequently lost a lot of our body hair too). Gossip replaced grooming, since we could now tend to our relationships, forge alliances, and ease our social anxieties through word of mouth rather than through hand in fur. What’s more, we could learn about what happened behind the scenes, collect strategic information about others that permitted us to make adaptive decisions around them, and sew facts and lies into others’ heads that would spread and serve our own selfish interests.
¹¹