Brain Rules for Baby (30 page)

If they saw a version of the film where Susan was praised for her violent actions, they hit the doll with great frequency. If they saw a version where Susan got punished, they hit Bobo with less frequency. But if Bandura then strides into the room and says, “I will give you a reward if you can repeat what you saw Susan do”, the children will pick up a hammer and start swinging at Bobo. Whether they saw the violence as rewarded or punished, they learned the behavior.

Bandura calls this “observational learning.” He was able to show that kids (and adults) learn a lot by observing the behaviors of others. It can be positive, too. A Mexican soap opera in which the characters celebrate books, and then ask viewers to sign up for reading classes, increased literacy rates across the country. Bandura’s finding is an extraordinary weapon of mass instruction.

Observational learning plays a powerful role in moral development. It is one of many skills hired in the brain’s ethical construction project. Let’s take a peek inside.

Imagine what you’d do in these two hypothetical situations:

Each case presents the same ratio, five deaths to one. The vast majority of people find the first scenario easy to answer. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They’d steer the trolley to the right. But the second situation involves a different moral choice: deciding whether to murder someone. The vast majority of people choose not to murder the man.

But not if they are brain-damaged. There’s a region above the eyes and behind the forehead called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. If this area of the brain suffers damage, moral judgment is affected. For these people, the fact of murder is not particularly relevant to their choice. Convinced that the needs of the many still outweigh the needs of the one, they push the large man over the bridge—saving five people and killing one.

What does this mean? If morality is an innate part of our brain’s neural circuitry, then damage to those areas should change our ability to make moral decisions. Some researchers think these results show just that. Some researchers don’t think trolley experiments demonstrate anything at all. They argue that no one can relate hypothetical
decisions to real-life, in-the-moment experiences. Any way out of this controversy? There might be, though it involves the ideas of philosophers who have been dead for more than 200 years.

Philosophy titans such as David Hume thought that base passions powered moral decisions. The brilliant Immanuel Kant argued that dispassionate reason was—or at least
ought
to be—the driving force behind moral decision-making. Modern neuroscience is betting that Hume was right.

Some researchers believe that we have two sets of moral reasoning circuits and that moral decisions (and conflicts) arise because the two systems get into arguments so frequently. The first system is responsible for making rational moral choices—the Kant circuits of our brain—which decides that saving five lives makes more sense than saving one. The second system is more personal, even emotive, working like a loyal opposition to the Kant circuitry. These neurons let you visualize the large man plunging to his death, imagine how the poor fellow and his family would feel, realize his horrible death would be your responsibility. This Hume-like view causes most people’s brains to pause, then issue a veto order over this choice. The brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in mediating this philosophical struggle. When it is damaged, Hume takes a hike.

What does this mean for parents wanting to raise a moral child? As we saw in the previous chapter, emotions are the foundation of a child’s happiness. It appears that they are also the basis of moral decision-making. A bombshell of a finding comes from a man named Elliot, under the observant eyes of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

Elliot had been a role model for his community: capable manager in a big business, terrific husband, church elder, family man.
Everything changed, however, the day he had brain surgery to remove a tumor near his frontal lobe. He came out of his surgery with his intelligence and perceptual skills intact. But he gained three unusual traits.

First,
he was incapable of making up his mind
. Elliot ruminated over the tiniest minutiae of life. Decisions that for us take only seconds took him hours. He couldn’t decide what TV station to watch, what color of pen to pick up, what to wear, where to go in the morning. He analyzed everything endlessly. Like a man hovering over a buffet table but incapable of putting anything on his plate, his life became one long equivocation. Not surprisingly, Elliot’s world fell apart. He lost his job and eventually his marriage. He started new businesses and watched them all fail. The IRS investigated him. He eventually went bankrupt and moved back in with his parents.

Damasio started working with Elliot in 1982. As he put Elliot through the full gamut of behavioral tests, he soon noticed the second unusual trait:
Elliot could not feel anything emotionally
. In fact, he seemed to have no emotions at all. You could show him a gory picture, an erotic picture, a baby. No measurable response from his heart or his brain. He flat-lined. It was as if Damasio had hooked up his fancy physiological electronics to a mannequin.

This led Damasio to the third trait.
Elliot had trouble making moral judgments.
He couldn’t have cared less that his indecisive behaviors led to a divorce or to bankruptcy or to any loss of social standing. Abstract tests showed that he knew right from wrong, yet he behaved and felt as if he didn’t. He could even remember that he used to experience such feelings, but they were now lost in a distant moral fog. As scholar Patrick Grim has observed, what Elliot
did
was clearly untethered from what Elliot
knew
.

This is an incredible finding. Because Elliot could no longer integrate emotional responses into his practical judgments, he completely lost his ability to make up his mind. His entire decision-making machinery collapsed, including his moral judgment.

Other studies confirm that a loss of emotion equals a loss of decision-making. We now know that children who have suffered damage to the ventromedial and polar prefrontal cortices before their second birthday have symptoms quite similar to Elliot’s.

If you eavesdrop on the human brain while it is busy wrestling with ethical choices, you see a bewildering number of regions becoming as active as an
Iron Chef
episode. The lateral orbitofrontal cortex; the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right lateralized; the ventral striatum; the ventromedial hypothalamus; the amygdala—all get involved. Emotions and logic, as we discussed in the previous chapter, are freely and messily mixed up in the brain.

How do we get Kant (logic) and Hume (emotion) out of all these structures? We are only in the beginning stages of understanding how they function in moral decisions. We know there is a regional division of labor: The surface regions are preoccupied with assessing facts. The deeper regions are preoccupied with processing emotions. They are connected by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is oversimplified, but think of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex as the Golden Gate Bridge, connecting San Francisco (emotions) to its northern neighbor, Marin County (just the facts, Ma’am). Here’s how some scientists think the traffic generally flows:

This all occurs in the space of a few milliseconds, a speed requiring that the emotion-generating areas of the brain work in such close concert with the rational areas that it is impossible to tell where one starts and the other leaves off. The integration is so tight, we can actually say that without the irrational, you can’t achieve the rational. As Jonah Lehrer elegantly puts it in his book
How We Decide
, “The brain that cannot process emotions cannot make up its mind.”

This biology tells us that emotional regulation is an important component of raising a moral child. So is executive function. The healthy integration of both processes will go a long way toward keeping a child in touch with her inner Mother Teresa.

So, the question now becomes: If kids are born with an innate number of moral construction materials, how do we help our children build moral houses worth inhabiting? How do we get them to that coveted stage of moral internalization?

Families who raise moral kids follow very predictable patterns when it comes to rules and discipline. The patterns are not a behavioral insurance policy, but they are as close as research gets us right now. Many interlocking components make up these patterns; an illustration from my wife’s kitchen may simplify things. We used to keep a three-legged stool near the refrigerator to help our boys reach the shelves. Think of the flat seat of that stool as representing the development of a moral awareness, or conscience. Each leg represents
what researchers know about how to support it. You need all three legs for the stool to fulfill its job description. This well-balanced triad statistically provides children with the sturdiest seat—the most finely attuned moral reflexes. The three legs are:

I’ll borrow scenes from a TV show to illustrate each.

A little boy at the dinner table punches his brother, demanding, “I want your ice,
now!
” Mom and Dad look horrified. A plump, elegant stranger with a British accent also sits at the table. She doesn’t seem horrified at all. She is, however, taking notes, something like a product tester. “What are you going to do? she asks the parents calmly. The boy punches his brother again. “I will take away your dessert if you do that again”, Mom says sternly to the child. He does it again. Mom looks down at her plate. Dad looks away, angry. The parents, it seems, have no idea how to answer the British woman’s question.

Welcome to the invasive world of the TV nanny. You’ve probably seen these reality shows, all of which follow a familiar formula: Families clearly out of control allow a camera crew access to their lives, all in the company of a professional nanny. Invariably blessed with an authoritative accent from the British Isles, she proceeds to act like a Nottingham sheriff come to clean house. The nanny has a week to perform her domestic miracle, transforming the harried parents into loving disciplinarians and their little hellions into angels. Among the scenes:

Toddler Aiden refuses to go to bed, wailing at the top of his lungs. He knows that when his parents say, “Lights out—I mean it”, they
don’t really mean it at all. If there is a curfew, it is unannounced or unenforced, and its absence makes Nanny’s brow wrinkle. It takes Aiden hours to go to bed.

A little boy named Mike accidently trips on the stairs, dropping a bunch of books he was carrying. The little guy cringes and tries to hide, expecting a yelling from his moody father. He gets one, gale force. Nanny intervenes: She goes over to the boy, helps him pick up the books, and says with a sad kindness, “You look really afraid, Mike. Did your dad frighten you?” Little Mike nods, then bolts up the stairs. Later that night, like a British bulldog, Nanny gives the dad a biting lecture about the child’s need to feel safe.

Amanda makes an effort to go to bed on time all by herself, which she had resisted before. This effort goes unnoticed, however, because the parents are busy chasing her younger twin brothers, trying to get them to brush their teeth. Once finished, the parents flop down in front of the television. Nanny tucks neglected Amanda into bed and says, “Good job. You did that all by yourself, and no fuss! Wow!”

The TV nannies solutions are sometimes irritating, sometimes spot on. But in these cases they follow the behavioral science of our first leg of discipline: consistent rules that are rewarded on a regular basis. Watch what they do, paying attention to four characteristics.

In the example of Aiden above, the toddler either does not have a set bedtime or ignores the one that’s supposed to be in place. His only guidance is his parent’s behavior, which is waffling and ambiguous. Aiden has no direction and, at the end of a busy, tiring day, very little social reserve. No wonder he shrieks.