The Fear Factor Page 23
Thus, an obvious question arises: Why can people still be so awful to one another? Why is there violence and hatred and cruelty? Why are some 400,000 people around the world murdered every year? Why did the Holocaust happen? Why can untold millions of suffering refugees not find asylum within the many prosperous nations of the world?
When it comes to all manner of crime, cruelty, and callousness, it is clear that the 1 or 2 percent of true psychopaths among us are disproportionately responsible for much of it. But remember that this fact says nothing about “human nature.” In fact, as I’ve emphasized, the fact that psychopaths are so very different from other people only serves to highlight the average person’s capacity for genuine compassion and concern. That said, we clearly cannot blame psychopaths for all the cruelty and violence in the world, or even most of it. Among people incarcerated for violent crimes, for example, only about half are true psychopaths. A nation doesn’t invade another country or commit ghastly atrocities because the entire nation is made up of psychopaths. And in daily life, minor acts of cruelty and callousness are too widespread to all be the work of psychopaths. If it’s true that nature has built most humans so beautifully for compassion, how can this be?
Part of the answer is that nature has also built us beautifully for aggression and violence. There is nothing inherently contradictory about this. Consider the case of the lioness who slaughtered a baboon she intended to eat one minute, then tenderly retrieved and groomed that baboon’s baby the next—then savagely chased another lion away from “her” baby a moment later. Or consider the sheep who nurses and dotes on her own lamb one minute before callously butting away the hungry lamb of another ewe. Are these creatures really caring, or are they really cruel? It is both foolish and unnecessary to come down on one side or the other. Both capacities are equally real. Similarly, the question of whether humans are compassionate or cruel can never be answered—we are both. At least, we have the capacity to be. The real question is: when do we express compassion versus cruelty, and why, and to whom? A complete answer to this question requires understanding the essential, inexorable influence of culture on the basic biological processes at hand: how the physical and social environments we inhabit shape our views about, and treatment of, the other beings we encounter during our lives, and how our culture may ultimately enable us to expand our capacity for compassion and altruism.
This chapter delves into four considerations that should be kept in mind as we set out to understand how we might become more altruistic.
1. We are already so much better than we think we are.
It is easy to be misled by attention-grabbing atrocities, but try not to be. The actual numbers are clear: goodness is overwhelmingly common, and kindness is the norm, not the exception. Recall the World Giving Index, which is compiled from the results of massive Gallup polls of thousands of people around the world. The 2016 Index tracked how residents of 140 countries responded to three questions that, together, span a wide range of altruistic behaviors: (1) Have you, in the last month, given money to charity? (2) Have you engaged in volunteer work? (3) Have you given help to a needy stranger? All three forms of altruism can be motivated by a variety of forces, but the third question indexes the kind of generosity most likely to represent a spontaneous, caring response to another’s distress or need. This question is aimed at capturing direct acts of altruism like helping a lost stranger find their way, picking up something that was dropped, or giving to a needy person begging for help. Helping a needy stranger also happens to be by far the most common form of generosity in the world, according to the Index: over half of the world’s population report helping a needy stranger every month. Donating money and volunteering are also remarkably common. Every month over 1 billion people donate money to a charity. And over 1 billion volunteer their time. Every month.
The United States is a more generous country than nearly any other nation on earth, according to these three indices. Across the last five years, it has remained the second-most-generous country in the world. Americans donate hundreds of billions of dollars of their own money annually to charities, and spend over 7 billion hours volunteering to help members of their communities (and this number includes only formal volunteering through charitable organizations). And according to the Index, the United States is a particular standout in giving help to needy strangers. Extrapolating from the Index’s results, Americans offer help to hundreds of millions of strangers every year in countless unknown acts of direction-giving, belonging-collecting, change-offering, and the like. Their help also includes forms of altruism not assessed by the World Giving Index, like blood donation. Americans donate over 13 million units of their blood to sick and injured strangers annually, and many of these donations represent spontaneous responses to strangers’ suffering and distress. Blood donations reliably surge following publicized tragedies like mass shootings or terrorist attacks. Two months after 9/11, the number of Americans who reported having donated blood had increased by 50 percent. Thousands more Americans undergo painful medical procedures to give strangers the marrow from their very bones every year, and many millions more have volunteered to make these donations if asked. And of course, every year dozens of Carnegie Hero Fund awardees and hundreds of altruistic kidney donors take significant risks to save the lives of strangers.
And these numbers reflect only altruism toward humans. Americans also rescue hundreds of thousands of animals every year. When the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association conducted a survey of animal rescues in 2007, respondents reported having treated over 64,000 rescued birds, 39,000 mammals, and 2,300 reptiles and amphibians that year alone. Numbers like these mean that, on any given day, hundreds of Americans are rescuing vulnerable, helpless creatures that they encounter. Not, of course, that Americans are alone in this regard. On a webpage that compiles the activities of international wildlife rehabilitation groups, you can scroll through a glorious, seemingly endless list of 153 nations, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, where organized groups of altruists are coming to the aid of the animals among them. And if my own experiences are any indicator, many of them are doing so despite personal risks or costs to themselves, and despite the absence of any personal gain.
All of this comports with laboratory findings showing that, when given the opportunity to be generous, most people will be, at least some of the time. The amount of goodness displayed freely and frequently by large proportions of the populace—large pluralities and even majorities in some instances, not just an elite few—is staggering. It’s overwhelming.
2016 World Giving Index estimates of increases in helping behaviors reported around the world: assisting needy strangers (top line), donating money (middle line), and volunteering (bottom line). The gray bars denote annual GDP growth rate. World Giving Index 2016. ©Charities Aid Foundation.
And not only are people good—they’re getting better. Across a wide range of time frames and definitions of altruism, the incidence of helping is continually rising. The World Giving Index shows that trends in all three forms of generosity it evaluates—donating to charity, volunteering, and helping needy strangers—are increasing year to year around the world, although official numbers go back only five years.
Other figures back these numbers up. Charitable giving estimates for the last forty years in the United States show that charitable giving has increased steadily and significantly during this period. Per capita, Americans donated over three times as much money to charity in 2015 as they did in 1975, even after adjusting for inflation. Globally, blood donations are also increasing: 10.7 million more donations were made in 2013 from voluntary, unpaid donors compared to 2008. Blood donation rates in the United States also continue to rise, as do bone marrow donations—over three times as many people received marrow from strangers in 2015 as in 1995. It’s anybody’s guess how current blood and bone marrow donation rates would compare to rates in the more distant past had the technology for widespread donation been available then, but it’s intere
sting to note that it was only in the 1970s that the United States even switched to an all-volunteer blood supply. Prior to that time, blood donors were paid. In other words, whereas 100 percent of blood donors today are altruistic donors, many or most were not fifty years ago. And of course, as recently as twenty years ago, altruistic organ donation did not exist and was widely viewed as unfathomable, even though it was medically feasible and desperately needed. Only in the last two decades have most people even been able to conceive of an act of such extraordinary generosity.
One possible exception to the overall trend may be volunteering in the United States. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates show that volunteering has generally either held steady or dropped slightly during the last twelve years. It’s hard to be certain how to interpret this pattern. It is possible that changes in volunteering reflect true reductions in the desire to expend time and effort helping others. Alternatively, because this is the only indicator of altruism that appears to be declining, the trend may instead reflect forces that affect volunteering specifically. It may, for example, reflect increases in the number of hours Americans spend working, which could cut into the time available to volunteer. Or it could reflect the general decline in various kinds of civic participation in the United States, from voting to joining clubs to attending church. Ongoing declines in religious affiliation may be particularly relevant, as religious organizations are the single biggest supporters of volunteering in America. It may be primarily formal volunteering through charitable organizations that is declining, rather than volunteering overall. This would be consistent with the fact that the World Giving Index, which uses a looser definition of volunteering, continues to record increasing, not decreasing, rates of volunteering in the United States.
National Philanthropic Trust estimates of annual charitable donations in the United States from 1975 to 2015.
Giving USA Foundation, “Charitable Giving Statistics,” in Giving USA 2016, available at: National Philanthropic Trust, https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/.
Not only are people helping one another more, but they are also hurting one another less. In his terrific book The Better Angels of Our Natures, Steven Pinker has provided convincing evidence that the incidence of all manner of cruelty and violence has been steadily decreasing for centuries, regardless of the time frame or the type of cruelty under consideration: deaths in international wars, deaths in civil wars, murders, executions, child abuse, animal abuse, domestic violence—the list goes on and on. All of it falling, falling—not linearly, but persistently over time, all over the world. In Europe, the homicide rate today is a mere one-fiftieth of what it was during medieval times. Cruel practices like slavery and torture that were commonplace around the world for many thousands of years are now nearly extinct. Mauritania’s abolition of slavery in 1980 marked the first time in history that slavery was illegal everywhere in the world. Torture of even vicious criminals is now widely condemned, whereas it was once a standard punishment everywhere for crimes that today would be considered minor. I recently was stunned to learn that in the United States it was widespread and accepted for police officers to torture suspects up through the 1930s. Support for capital punishment has also been steadily dropping. In 2015, for the first time in fifty years, only a minority of polled Americans still favored the practice; this was also the first year in recorded history in which Europe was completely free of capital punishment. Although 2016 did not see this record matched (Belarus executed at least one person), that year had the distinction of being—once the Colombians ultimately agreed on a FARC peace treaty—the first year in recorded history in which there were no war zones anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
All of this makes it very difficult to refute that, relative to any reasonable frame of reference, modern human societies are generous, peaceful, compassionate, and continually improving. We could only be considered selfish and violent in comparison to a utopian society in which no violence or cruelty takes place—a somewhat unfair comparison considering that there is no evidence that such a society has ever existed. A fairer comparison would be to all the actual alternative realities represented by the various forms that human societies have taken over the millennia. And relative to any of these actual alternative realities, the present era is one of overwhelming caring and kindness.
Not that you would ever know this by asking people. Despite all the numbers to the contrary, majorities of respondents polled in the United States and elsewhere believe that people are, as a rule, selfish, preoccupied by their own interests, and untrustworthy—and getting worse. Every year over the last decade a majority of Americans have reported that crime that year increased relative to the previous year, when the precise opposite has nearly always been true. This imaginary dystopia is not just an American phenomenon. Although youth violence and delinquency have also plummeted in the United Kingdom during the last twenty years, majorities of Britons consistently believe that they have increased or stayed the same.
These striking discrepancies between actual reality and beliefs about reality reflect the fact that our brains are not very good at tabulating the actual state of the world. They weren’t built to be. Sure, our brains need to calculate the nature of the world around us accurately enough so that we don’t walk into walls or fall off precipices. But even our perceptions of the simplest physical surfaces we see in the world around us—a solid white wall, rough ground, a sharp edge—are more illusion than reality. The world as it really exists is a colorless, swirling soup of atomic particles made up nearly entirely of empty space. The rich, textured colors and shapes and feelings that we experience—like solid and white and rough and sharp—feel real, but they are not. They are a product of the interpretive machinery inside our brain. Eighty percent of the fibers entering the visual processing areas of the brain emanate from the rest of the brain, not from our eyes. That means the world we see is a warped interpretation of reality, not “reality.” And this inaccuracy bleeds into every facet of cognition. Inaccurate perceptions of the world lead to inaccurate memories of it, which lead to inaccurate predictions about the future.
And if our brains can so massively distort our perceptions of simple concrete objects like walls and edges, how badly do you think they distort abstract concepts like “human nature”? The answer is: quite badly.
It would be bad enough if our brains were merely randomly inaccurate in how they perceive, remember, and predict the world, but it’s even worse than that. They are also systematically biased toward perceiving, remembering, and predicting bad things. The reason is that, again, brains’ reason for existing isn’t accuracy—it’s survival. As a result, they are especially biased toward focusing on bad things that could threaten our survival over good things that would at best incrementally improve it, a phenomenon known as the negativity bias.
The negativity bias dictates that we generally pay more attention to bad events, encode their details with higher fidelity, and remember them better afterward. This asymmetry is as prevalent in the social domain as it is everywhere else. Negative comments from others have a stronger impact than positive comments, such that, for example, the relationship psychologist John Gottman has estimated that a romantic relationship must be marked by at least a five-to-one ratio of kind to unkind comments to be successful. Negative actions also stick in a way that positive ones do not; the worse the action, the more likely it is to be remembered and used to estimate what a person or group of people are really like, with particularly extreme negative actions, like overt cruelty, carrying disproportionate weight. Paradoxically, negative actions carry disproportionate weight in part because they are rare and unexpected, which makes them even more attention-getting and memorable when they do occur. As a result, even in a world full of people speaking and acting in overwhelmingly good ways—which they do—we notice and remember the small number of highly callous, selfish, and untrustworthy acts better, and we perceive them as far more representativ
e of reality than is actually the case.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that much of what we know about the wider world of “people” beyond the ones we know personally derives not from our own experiences, or even from secondhand reports from friends and family, but from the media. This is a problem because the media are also not motivated to represent the actual state of the world in an unbiased way. I’m not referring here to political bias, but to simple negativity bias. Most media outlets are ultimately profit-driven and need people to pay attention to them to sell copies and airtime and advertisements. Because of this, and because people are biased to pay more attention to bad things, the journalists who want us to read or watch or listen to their stories are biased toward telling us about bad things. Bad news sells, as the familiar saying goes. And so, by some estimates, the ratio of negative to positive events covered by popular news media is seventeen-to-one, a ratio that does not remotely reflect the ratio of positive to negative events in the actual world. And it’s not just any bad news that sells. As the aphorism goes, “dog bites man” is much less newsworthy than “man bites dog.” The more unusual or unexpected the bad news, the more likely it is to capture people’s interest and make it to press. Thus, once again, it is in part because cruelty and violence are becoming rarer that their newsworthiness continues to increase.
The resulting deluge of selectively reported news about objectively rare violence and cruelty feeds into the perception that we live in a world in which many more bad things happen than good, further fueling the mistaken but common belief that the world is dangerous and becoming ever more so and that people are cruel and callous and getting worse. Is it any wonder that people who consume more news media also tend to be unhappier, more anxious, and more cynical?