Читать книгу The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides - Mariano Sigman - Страница 22

We adults are not unbiased when we judge others. Not only do we keep in mind their previous history and the context of their actions (which we should), but we also have very different opinions of the person committing the actions, or being the victim of them, if they look like us or not (which we shouldn’t).

Throughout all cultures, we tend to form more friendships and have more empathy with those who look like us. On the other hand, we usually judge more harshly and show more indifference to the suffering of those who are different. History is filled with instances in which human groups have massively supported or, in the best-case scenario, rejected violence directed at individuals who were not like them.

This even manifests itself in formal justice proceedings. Some judges serve sentences displaying a racial bias, most probably without being aware that race is influencing their judgement. In the United States, African American males have been incarcerated at about six times the rate of white males. Is this difference in the incarceration rate a result (at least in part) of the judges having different sentencing practices? This seemingly simple and direct question turns out to be hard to answer because it is difficult to separate this psychological factor from possible racial differences in case characteristics. To overcome this problem Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, found an ingenious solution, exploiting the fact that in the United States cases are randomly assigned to judges. Hence, on average, the type of case and the nature of defendants are the same for all judges. A racial difference in sentencing could potentially be explained by case characteristics or by a difference in the quality of the assigned attorneys (which is not random). But if this were all, then this difference should be the same for all judges. Instead, Mullainathan found a huge disparity – of almost 20 per cent – between judges in the racial gap in sentencing. While this may be the most convincing demonstration that race matters in the courtroom, the method is partly limited since it cannot tell whether the variability between judges’ results is due to some of them discriminating against African Americans, or some judges discriminating against whites, or a mixture of both.

Physical appearance also affects whether someone is likely to be hired in a job interview. Since the early seventies, several studies have shown that attractive applicants are typically judged to have a more appropriate personality for a job, and to perform better than their less attractive counterparts. Of course, this was not just a matter of comment. Applicants who were judged to be more attractive were also more likely to be hired. As we will see in Chapter 5, we all tend to make retrospective explanations that serve to justify our choices. Hence the most likely timeline for this line of argument is like this: first the interviewer decides to hire the applicant (among other things based on his or her beauty) and only then generates ad hoc a long list of attributes (he or she was more capable, more suited for the job, more reliable …) that serve to justify the choice which indeed had nothing to do with these considerations.

The similarities that generate these predispositions can be based on physical appearance, but also on religious, cultural, ethnic, political or even sports-related questions. This last example, because it is presumed to be more harmless – although, as we know, even sporting differences can have dramatic consequences – is easier to assimilate and recognize. Someone forms part of a consortium, a club, a country, a continent. That person suffers and celebrates collectively with that consortium. Pleasure and pain are synchronized between thousands of people whose only similarity is belonging to a tribe (sharing a jersey, a neighbourhood or a history) that unites them. But there is something more: pleasure at the suffering of other tribes. Brazil celebrates Argentina’s defeats, and Argentina celebrates Brazil’s. A fan of Liverpool cheers for the goal scored against Manchester United. When rooting for our favourite sports teams, we often feel less inhibited about expressing Schadenfreude, our pleasure at the suffering of those unlike us.

What are the origins of this? One possibility is that it has ancestral evolutionary roots, that the drive collectively to defend what belonged to one’s tribe was advantageous at some point in human history and, as a result, adaptive. This is merely conjecture but it has a precise, observable footprint that can be traced. If Schadenfreude is a constituent aspect of our brains (the product of a slow learning process within evolutionary history), it should manifest itself early in our lives, long before we establish our political, sports or religious affiliations. And that is exactly how it happens.

Wynn performed an experiment to ask whether infants prefer those who help or harm dissimilar persons. This experiment was also carried out in a puppet theatre. Before entering the theatre, a baby between nine and fourteen months old, seated comfortably on their mother’s lap, chose between crackers or green beans. Apparently, food choices reveal tendencies and strong allegiances.

Then two puppets came in, successively and with a considerable amount of time between the two entrances. One puppet demonstrates an affinity with the baby and says that it loves the food the child has chosen. Then they leave and, just as before, there is another scene where the puppet with similar taste is playing with a ball, drops it and has to deal with two different puppets: one who helps and the other who steals the ball. Then babies are asked to pick up one of the two puppets and they show a clear preference for the helper. One who helps someone similar to us is good. But when the puppet who loses the ball is the one who had chosen the other food, the babies more often choose the ball robber. As with the thief, it is gastronomic Schadenfreude: the babies sympathize with the puppet that hassles the one with different taste preferences.

Moral predispositions leave robust, and sometimes unexpected, traces. The human tendency to divide the social world into groups, to prefer our own group and go against others, is inherited, in part, from predispositions that are expressed very early in life. One example that has been particularly well studied is language and accent. Young children look more at a person who has a similar accent and speaks their mother tongue (another reason to advocate bilingualism). Over time, this bias in our gazes disappears but it transforms into other manifestations. At two years old, children are more predisposed to accept toys from those who speak their native language. Later, at school age, this effect becomes more explicit in the friends they choose. As adults, we are already familiar with the cultural, emotional, social and political segregations that emerge simply based on speaking different languages in neighbouring regions. But this is not only an aspect of language. In general, throughout their development, children choose to relate to the same type of individuals they would have preferentially directed their gaze at in early childhood.

As happens with language, these predispositions develop, transform and reconfigure with experience. Of course, there is nothing within us that is exclusively innate; to a certain extent, everything takes shape on the basis of our cultural and social experience. This book’s premise is that revealing and understanding these predispositions can be a tool for changing them.