Adverse effects of sustained (not moderate) stress

1. Easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn fear
2. Emotionally salient information is processed with less accuracy
3. It impairs working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and task shifting
4. We become less empathetic and less prosocial
5. The frontal cortex has less control over the amygdala which results in an overactive amygdala

For adolescents "emotional intelligence" and "social intelligence" predict adult success and happiness better than do IQ tests or SAT scores. It's all about social memory, emotional perspective taking, impulse control, empathy, ability to work with others, and self-regulation.

Abortion

Legalization of abortion reduces crime rates: a state by state analysis of the liberalization of abortion laws and the demographics of the crime drop showed that when abortions become readily available in an area, rates of crime by young adults decline about 20 years later. What majorly predicts a life of crime? Being born to a mother who, if she could, would have chosen that you not be. What's the most basic thing provided by a mother? Knowing that she is happy that you exist.

Childhood Adversity

Childhood adversity including paternal deprivation; childhood poverty; observing violence; exposure to violence or natural disasters; and exposure to domestic violence, increases the odds of adults having:
1. Depression, anxiety and/or substance abuse
2. Impaired cognitive capabilities
3. Impaired impulse control
4. Impaired emotional regulation
5. Antisocial behavior, including violence
6. Relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood (e.g., staying with an abusive partner)
7. Impaired learning
8. Impaired memory

Kids witnessing violence on TV, in movies, in the news, in music videos, and in violent video games, increases their odds of aggression soon after, and predicts higher levels of aggression in young adults. The more category of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy functional adulthood.

Stimulating environments, harsh parents, good neighborhoods, uninspiring teachers, optimal diets--all alter genes in the brain. Childhood adversity can make for damaged and damaging adults. This information hints at how bad outcomes might be reversed and good outcomes reinforced. Most adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought, but the longer you wait to intervene the harder it will be.

Immigration

Currenly, 12% of Americans are immigrants, another 12% are children of immigrants, 1% are pure Native Americans, and everyone else descend from people who emigrated within the last 500 years.

Income Inequality

Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity and cooperation in a community. There are two questions that test social capital:
1. Can people in the community usually be trusted?
2. How many organizations in the community does someone participate in?

Cultures with more income inequality have less social capital. Hierarchy is about domination. You can't have a society with both dramatic income inequality and plentiful social capital. Income inequality makes people crummier to one another. High inequality/low social capital predict high rates of bullying and of antisocial punishment and it makes people less kind (antisocial punishment is punishing people for being overly generous because they make everyone else look bad and they increase the expectation of generosity from everyone else).

People at the top of unequal societies generate justifications for their status. And the more income inequality, the more the powerful adhere to myths about the hidden blessings of subordination--"They may be poor, but at least they're happy/honest/loved."

When times are tough the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death.

The poorer you are, the worse your health, the higher the incidence and impact of numerous diseases, and the shorter your life expectancy. It's not so much being poor that predicts poor health, it's feeling poor--someone's subjective socioeconomic status. It's poverty amid plenty--income inequality.

If you want to improve health and quality of life for the average person in a society, you spend money on public goods--better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal heathcare. But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct benefit the wealthy feel from improving public goods. Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good--a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have available to them to mount effective political opposition (e.g., lobbying to promote private affluence and public squalor).

The inequality/health link paves the way for understanding how inequality also makes for more crime and violence. Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty amid plenty is. The extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations. Income inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. Inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. States with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education.

A rat being shocked activates a stress response (glucocorticoid secretion). But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. If you are a low ranking baboon, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. When inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor.

The so-called Gilded Age and the years following saw huge income disparities; in the early twentieth century, the highest-earning 1% of households earned 18% of all income, and the bottom 90% earned 60%. The equivalent numbers in 2022 are worse: 20% and around 50% (New Yorker Magazine 9/21/26 John Lanchester "The US' wealthiest--and stealthiest--class").

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) is the measure of how much people value power and prestige, the higher someone's SDO score, the less activation in the brain centers that process empathy and disgust at the circumstances that evoked the pain. Those with the most interest in prestige and power seem least likely to feel for those less fortunate.

In World War I, there was a Christmas Truce and a Live and Let Live system that developed from a modified Tit for Tat in dealing with truce violations, with its propensity toward cooperation, punishment for violations, mechanisms for forgiveness and clear rules. The real enemy was the bloated aristocracy who whould sacrifice the soldiers for their own power.

Gossip

Hunter/Gatherer societies expend lots of collective effort on enforcing fairness, indirect reciprocity, and avoidance of despotism. This is accomplised with that terrific norm-enforcement mechanism, gossip. Hunter/Gatherers gossip endlessly, and it's mostly about the usual: norm violation by high-status individuals. Gossiping serves the following purposes: it helps for reality testing; passing news; and building consensus. Gossip is the weapon of norm enforcement.

Shame is external judgment by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame is about honor and requires an audience. Guilt is for cultures that treasure privacy and is about conscience. Shame is a negative assessment of the entire individual, guilt that of an act, making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner. Effective shaming requires a conformist, homogenous population; effective guilt requires respect for law.

Anthropologists have found that about 2/3 of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative. Gossip (with the goal of shaming) is a weapon of the weak against the powerful. It has always been fast and cheap and is infinitely more so now in the era of the Internet.

Us Versus Them

We tend to think of Us as noble, loyal, and composed of distinctive individuals whose failings are due to circumstance. Thems, in contrast, seem disgusting, ridiculous, simple, homogeneous, undifferentiated, and interchangeable. All frequently backed up by rationalizations for our intuitions.

That is a picture of an individual navigating Us/Them in his mind. Interactions between groups tend to be more competitive and aggressive than are interactions between individual Us-es and Thems. The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.

Us/Them-ing typically involves inflating the merits of Us concerning core values--we are more correct, wise, moral, and worthy when it comes to knowing what the gods want/running the economy/raising kids/fighting this war. We are superior.

We can be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we actually are. One of the tools of the propagandist and idealogue drumming up hatred of the out-group (blacks, Jews, Muslims, Tutsis, Armenians, Roma) is to characterize them as animals, vermin, cockroaches, pathogens. So different that they hardly count as humans. This underpins many of our worst moments.

Antidote: focus on the larger, shared goals; Practice perspective taking; Individuate, individuate, individuate; Mean people suck.

Republicans (page 446)

People have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). One particularly thorough demonstration of this involved more than 15,000 subjects in the UK and the United States; importantly, the links among low IQ, RWA, and intergroup prejudice were there after controlling for education and socioeconomic status. The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

Jonathan Haidt identifies 6 foundations of morality--care versus harm; fairness versus cheating; liberty versus oppression; loyalty versus betrayal; authority versus subversion; sanctity versus degradation. Both experimental and real-world data show that liberals preferentially value care, fairness and liberty while conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority and sanctity.

The insular cortex has a role in mediating gustatory and olfactory disgust in mammals and in mediating moral disgust in humans. You can reliably stoke hatred of Thems by making them seem viscerally disgusting. Issues anchored in the insula help explain differences in politcal orientation. Additional neurobiological differences have been demonstrated. Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of gray matter in the cingulate cortex (with its involvement in empathy), whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala (with, of course, its starring role in threat perception). Moreover, there's more amygdala activation in conservatives than in liberals when viewing a disgusting image or doing a risky task.

Obedience and Conformity

The elements of human obedience range from loyalty, admiration, and emulation to brownnosing, sycophancy, and instrumental self-interest, and can range from mere compliance (i.e., the public conformity of going along, without actually agreeing) to drinking the Kool-Aid (i.e., identifying with the authority and internalizing and extending its beliefs). Obedience is closely intertwined with conformity. Both consist of going along; the former with the group, the latter with authority. And for us the commonalities are what matter. Moreover, the opposites--disobedience and nonconformity--are also intertwined and range from the independence of marching to a different drummer to the intentionality and mirrored determinism of anticonformity.

Conformity can be great--it's helpful if everyone in a culture agrees on whether shaking your head up and down means yes or no. Conforming is necessary for the benefits of the wisdom of the crowd. And it can be truly comforting. But obviously conformity can be horrendous--joining in on bullying, oppressing, shunning, expelling, killing, just because everyone else is on board.

Obedience can be swell too, ranging from everyone stopping at stop signs to my kids listening when my wife and I say it's bedtime. And malign obedience obviously underlies "just following orders"--from goose-stepping to Jonestown's wretched obeying the command to kill their children.

When you get the news that everyone else disagrees with you, there is activation in a network of areas of the brain including the prefrontal cortex. This is a network mobilized during reinforcement learning, where you learn to modify your behavior when there is a mismatch between what you expected to happen and what actually did. Find out that everyone disagrees with you and this network activates. What is it basically telling you? Not just that you're different from everyone else. That you're wrong. Being different = being wrong. The greater the activation of this circuit, the greater the likelihood of changing answers to conform.

The neurobiology of conforming consists of a first wave of anxiety where we equate differentness with wrongness, followed by the cognitive work needed to change our opinion. The Asch experiment (page 461) shows that average people will go along with absurdly incorrect assertions in the name of conformity. the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments show that average people will do stunningly bad things in the name of obedience and conformity.

Humans have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

Feeling Someone's Pain, Understanding Someone's Pain

How much is an empathic state actually about yourself? "Ouch, that hurt" is a good way to learn not to repeat whatever you just did. But often, even better is to monitor someone else's misfortune--"That sure seems to have hurt her; I'm staying away from doing that." Crucially, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is essentail for learning fear and conditioned avoidance by observation alone. Going from "She seems to be having a miserable time" to "Thus I should avoid that" requires an intervening step of shared representation of self: "Like her, I wouldn't enjoy feeling that way." Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

When pain is rooted in injustice, disgust, indignation and anger sweep in because we know that this pain could have been prevented, or that someone profited from it. Even when it is unclear that a cause of pain lies in injustice, we seek attribution (scapegoating). The more the purity of empathy is clouded with the anger, disgust and indignation of blame, the harder it is to actually help.

Cognitive processes serve as a gatekeeper, deciding whether a particular misfortune is worthy of empathy. It is an enormous cognitive task for humans to overcome that, to reach an empathic state for someone who is different, unappealing, a Them. Acting morally toward an Us is automatic, while doing so for a Them takes work. This is the domain where you must suppress the automatic and implicit urges to be indifferent, if not repulsed, and do the creative motivated work of finding the affective commonalities.

Rich People and Empathy

When it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people's emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal.

Wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence--all great ways to decide that someone else's distress is beneath your notice or concern.

Compassion

You act compassionately towards one individual because of a globalized sense of wishing good things for the world. When there is a distressed person it's better to focus on compassion (a feeling of warmth and care toward that distressed person) than to focus on empathy (feeling the pain of someone in distress). Compassionate acts are often fostered by empathy. Try to make compassionate acts implicit and automatic.

Benefits to yourself from compassionate acts: the warm glow of having done good; the lessened sting of guilt; the increased sense of connection to others; the solidifying sense of being able to include goodness in your self-definition.

Propaganda

In Rwanda, the killing between Hutus and Tutsis ran for approximately 100 days. During that time, there was not only a Final Solution-style attempt to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda but also killing of Hutus who were married to Tutsis, who attempted to protect Tutsis, or who refused to participate in killings. By the time it was done, approximately 75% of Tutsis--between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people--and around 100,000 Hutus had been killed. Roughly 1 out of every 7 Rwandans. This translated into 5 times the rate of killing during the Nazi Holocaust. It was mostly ignored by the West.

How could this have happened?

1. The populace had a long tradition of unquestioning obedience to authority, a helpful trait to develop in a brutally dictatorial nation.
2. The government-controlled radio station (the main form of mass media in this marginally literate country) proclaimed that the intent of the invading Tutsi rebels was to kill every Hutu, and that one's Tutsi neighbors were a fifth column preparing to join in.
3. Hutu militants had for months before been distributing machetes to the Hutu populace.
4. The anti-Tutsi propaganda was ceaselessly dehumanizing, with the infamous pseudospeciation of Tutsis being referred to only as "cockroaches."

Stamp out the cockroaches. The cockroaches are planning to kill your children. The cockroaches [the supposedly devious and seductive Tutsi women] will steal your husbands. The cockroaches [Tutsi men] will rape your wives and daughters. Stamp out the cockroaches, save yourselves, kill the cock roaches.

And with insular cortices ablaze, machetes in one hand and transistor radios in the other, most Hutus did. Dehumanization and pseudospeciation are the tools of the propagandists of hate which are used to effectively exploit symbols of revulsion in the service of hate. Thems as disgusting. Thems as rodents, as a cancer, as a transitional species, Thems as reekingly malodorous, as living in hives of chaos that no normal human would. Thems as shit. Get the insulae of your followers to confuse the litereal and metaphorical, and you're 99% of the way there.

In 1487, two Dominican friars, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer published Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for "Hammer of the Witches"), the definitive treatise about why someone becomes a witch, how to identify them, and what to do with them. What was one of the surest ways to identify a witch? An epilectic seizure. Their book arrived in time to take advantage of mass production through the recently invented printing press by Gutenberg. Estimates are that from 100,000 to a million people were persecuted, tortured, or killed as witches in the aftermath.

On 10/10/90, Nayirah al-Sabah, the 15 year old daughter of the then Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, testified that she worked at a hospital and had witnessed Iraqi soldiers steal incubators to ship home as plunder leaving over 300 premature infants to die. The testimony was seen by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war, and was cited ten times by George H.W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. Later it emerged that the story was a pseudospeciating lie. She never worked at the hospital. She had been coached on what to say. She was part of a ruling Kuwait family that wanted Americans to go to war with Iraq. The incubator story was fabricated by the American public relations firm Hill + Knowlton. This is an example of atrocity propaganda.

Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggosts and cancer and shit. But also beware when it is our emphatic intuitions, rather than our hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals.

The Power of "Sacred Values" in Conflict Resolution

If you have two different cultures, each with a different moral vision as to what is correct, each passionately focused on "rights" whose meaning and power are incomprehensible to the other side. Sacred values are defended far out of proportion to their material or instrumental importance or likelihood of success, because to any group such values define "who we are." And therefore, not only are attempts to reach compromises on such issues by using material incentives unlikely to be productive, but they can be insultingly counterproductive. You can't buy us off into dishonoring that which we hold sacred.

For example, in the IRA ceasefire of 1994, they established a Parades Commission to ensure that neither group had inflammatory, symbol-laden parades in the other's neighborhoods in Belfast. Another example is Nelson Mandela who learned Afrikaans language and studied Afrikaans culture. Mandela entered into secret negotiations with the Afrikaans leader General Constand Viljoen. The general was anticipating tense negotiations. Instead the smiling, cordial Mandela led him to the warm, homey living room, sat beside him on a comfy couch designed to soften the hardest of asses, and spoke to the man in Afrikaans, including small talk about sports, leaping up now and then to get the two of them tea and snacks. Viljoen was stunned by Mandela's use of Afrikaans and warm, chatty familiarity with Afrikaans culture. An act of true respect for sacred values.

People kill and are willing to be killed for symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.

Mitigated Free Will

Kids take a test and get a high score. You then praise them in one of two ways--"What a great score; you must be so smart" or "What a great score, you must have worked so hard." When you praise kids for working hard, they tend to work harder the next time, show more resilience, enjoy the process more, and become more likely to value the accomplishment for its own sake (rather than for the grade). Praise kids for being smart and effort begins to seem suspect, beneath you--after all, if you're really so smart, you shouldn't have to work hard.

One assigns aptitude and impulse to biology and effort and resisting impulse to free will.

BIOLOGICAL STUFF / WILLPOWER
Delusionally hearing voices / Resisting their destructive commands
Proclivity toward alcoholism / Moderate or completely stop alcohol consumption
Destructive sexual urges / Resisting acting upon them
Having epileptic seizures / Not driving if you didn't take your meds
Not all that bright / Getting going when the going gets tough
Not the loveliest of faces / Resisting getting that huge, hideous nose ring

Things that can influence the items on the right: blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; a concussive head injury; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid levels; whether you're in pain; if you suffered childhood abuse; if you had a stroke in your frontal cortex; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; on and on.

It's great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it's usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn't hard. And it's often easiest to avoid temptation with distraction and reappraisal rather than willpower.

Punishment

Put people in brain scanners, give them scenarios of norm violations. Decision making about culpability for the violation correlates with activity in the cognitive dlPFC. But decision making about appropriate punishment activates the emotional vmPFC, along with the amygdala and insula; the more activation, the more punishment. The consequences of punishing are activation of dopaminergic rewards systems. A rush of self-righteous, virtuous pleasure. Punishment that feels just feels good.

Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer (in the year 1500 people with epilepsy were assumed to be witches and were burned at the stake). Now we mandate that if their seizures aren't under control, they can't drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasureable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistnat seizures "deserves" to be banned from driving.

Neuroscience is in it's infancy. The future will likely discover that many abnormal behaviors are a direct result of biologically malfunctioning brains or diseases. In the meantime, we should keep our severe punishments and our harsh judgments of other people in check.

However, people must be protected from individuals who are dangerous. Rehabilitate them if you can, but if you can't, and they are destined to remain dangerous, send them to the Island of Misfit Toys. If you remove them from society, then you are implicitly punishing them (appropriately) by limiting their free will.

Religion

A quote attributed to Napoleon, "Religious wars are people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend."

Religion is a particularly tenacious catalyst of violence. Frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted whether they'd die for their religion and whether they believed that people of other religions caused the world's troubles. It's not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it's being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds. Communal aspects of religiosity fuel out-group hostility.

Epilogue

It can seem hopeless that one can actually fix injustices and irrationalities in the world, can make things better. But one has no choice but to try. A quote by George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." A quote by Robert Sapolsky, "Those who do not remember the following inspirational people and their deeds are condemned to be less likely to repeat these reasons to hope.

1. Zenji Abe and Richard Fiske - Pearl Harbor apology
2. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. - My Lai Massacre
3. Mohamed Bouazizi - Arab Spring (although I don't recommend copying his deed)