The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (41 page)

Feeling bad about yourself is good for things other than sending people self-serving signals. To begin with, there is the function, mentioned above, of burning shame: a wrist-slapping for social blunders, a way of discouraging the repeat of status-reducing behaviors. Also, as the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has stressed, mood can efficiently focus energy.
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People of all statuses may get lethargic and glum when social, sexual, or professional prospects look dim, and then grow optimistic and energetic when opportunities arise. It's as if they had been resting up for a big match. And if no opportunities arise, and lethargy passes into mild depression, this mood may goad them into a fruitful shift of course — changing careers, jettisoning ungrateful friends, abandoning the pursuit of an elusive mate.

Darwin offers a good example of the manifold utility of bad feelings. In July of 1857, two years before publishing
The Origin of Species
, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, "I have been making some calculations about varieties talking yesterday with Lubbock, he has pointed out to me the grossest blunder which I have made in principle, & which entails 2 or 3 weeks lost work." This left Darwin feeling even less inclined than usual to stress his worth. "I am the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid Dog in all England," he wrote, "& am ready to cry at [sic] vexation at my blindness & presumption."
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Count the ways this glumness might be valuable. One: as a self-esteem deflator. Darwin had suffered a social humiliation. In a face-to face encounter, he was shown to be gravely confused on an issue within his supposed expertise. Perhaps some long-term slippage in self-esteem was in order; perhaps he should tone down the ambition of his scholarship, so as not to be perceived as a threat to England's great intellectual stars, who would in the end outshine him anyway.

Two: as a negative reinforcement. Lingering pain from this incident may have served to discourage Darwin from repeating behaviors (the confused analysis, in this case) that lead to humiliation. Perhaps he'd be more careful next time.

And three: as a course changer. If this gloom had persisted, even verging on depression, it might have altered Darwin's behavior more
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radically, diverting his energy into wholly new channels. "It is enough to make me tear up all my M.S. & give up in despair," he wrote the same day to Lubbock, thanking him for the correction and apologizing for being so "muddled."
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As we know, Darwin didn't tear up the manuscript. But if he had encountered a string of setbacks of this magnitude, he might well have abandoned the project. And this would probably have been a good thing for his long-term social status, if he indeed had been too consistently muddled to write an impressive book on the origin of species.

These three explanations for Darwin's gloom aren't mutually exclusive. Natural selection is a frugal and resourceful process, making multiple use of existing chemicals, and of the feelings those chemicals carry. This is one reason simple statements about the function of any neurotransmitter, such as serotonin, or any one mood, such as gloom, are tricky. But it is also a reason that a Darwinian doesn't feel stymied when something like a low (or high) opinion of oneself turns out to have several equally plausible purposes. They may all be genuine.

Where does truth belong on the spectrum of self-esteem? If one month, following a string of professional and social successes, you're fairly brimming with serotonin and feel enduringly competent, likable, and attractive, and the next month, after a few setbacks, and some serotonin slippage, you feel enduringly worthless, you can't have been right both times. Which time were you wrong? Is serotonin truth serum or a mind-numbing narcotic?

Maybe neither. When you're feeling either very good or very bad about yourself, it probably means that a large body of evidence is being hidden from view. The most truthful times come between the extremes.

Anyway, maybe "truth" is best left out of this altogether. Whether you're a "good" or a "worthless" person is a question whose objective meaning is, at best, elusive. And even when "truth" can be clearly defined, it is a concept to which natural selection is indifferent. To be sure, if an accurate portrayal of reality, to oneself or to others, can help spread one's genes, then accuracy of perception or communication may evolve. And often this will be the case (when, say, you remember where food is stored, and share the data with offspring or siblings). But when accurate reporting and genetic interest do thus
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intersect, that's just a happy coincidence. Truth and honesty are never favored by natural selection in and of themselves. Natural selection neither "prefers" honesty nor "prefers" dishonesty. It just doesn't care.

Reciprocal altruism brings its own agenda to the presentation of self, and thus to the deception of self. Whereas status hierarchies place a premium on our seeming competent, attractive, strong, smart, et-cetera, reciprocal altruism puts its accent on niceness, integrity, fairness. These are the things that make us seem like worthy reciprocal altruists. They make people want to strike up relationships with us. Puffing up our reputations as decent and generous folks can't hurt, and it often helps.

Richard Alexander, in particular, has stressed the evolutionary importance of moral self-advertisement. In The Biology of Moral Systems he writes that "modern society is filled with myths" about our goodness: "that scientists are humble and devoted truth-seekers; that doctors dedicate their lives to alleviation of suffering; that teachers dedicate their lives to their students; that we are all basically law-abiding, kind, altruistic souls who place everyone's interests before our own."
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There's no reason moral self-inflation has to involve self-deception. But there's little doubt that it can. The unconscious convolutions by which we convince ourselves of our goodness were seen in the laboratory before the theory of reciprocal altruism was around to explain them. In various experiments, subjects have been told to behave cruelly toward someone, to say mean things to him or even deliver what they thought were electric shocks. Afterwards, the subjects tended to derogate their victim, as if to convince themselves that he deserved his mistreatment — although they knew he wasn't being punished for any wrongdoing and, aside from that, knew only what you can learn about a person by briefly mistreating him in a laboratory netting. But when subjects delivered "shocks" to someone after being told he would get to retaliate by shocking them later, they tended
not
to derogate him.
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It is as if the mind were programmed with a simple rule: so long as accounts are settled, no special rationalization is in order; the symmetry of exchange is sufficient defense of your
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behavior. But if you cheat or abuse another person who doesn't cheat or abuse you, you should concoct reasons why he deserved it. Either way, you'll be prepared to defend your behavior if challenged; either way, you'll be prepared to fight with indignation any allegations that you're a bad person, a person unworthy of trust.

Our repertoire of moral excuses is large. Psychologists have found that people justify their failure to help others by minimizing, variously, the person's plight ("That's not an assault, it's a lover's quarrel"), their own responsibility for the plight, and their own competence to help.
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It's always hard to be sure that people really believe such excuses. But a famous series of experiments shows (in a quite different context) how oblivious the conscious mind can be to its real motivation, and how busily it sets about justifying the products of that motivation.

The experiments were conducted on "split-brain" patients — people who have had the link between left and right hemispheres cut to stop severe epileptic seizures. The surgery has surprisingly little effect on everyday behavior, but under contrived conditions, strange things can happen. If the word nut is flashed onto the left half of the visual field (which is processed by the right hemisphere), but not onto the right half (processed by the left hemisphere), the subject reports no conscious awareness of the signal; the information never enters the left hemisphere, which in most people controls language and seems to dominate consciousness. Meanwhile, though, the subject's left hand — controlled by the right hemisphere — will, if allowed to rummage through a box of objects, seize on a nut. The subject reports no awareness of this fact unless allowed to see what his left hand is up to.
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When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man's right brain, and he complies. When asked where he's going, his left brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he's going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what's so funny, she gives an answer that's less racy than the truth.
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Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain
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experiments, has said that language is merely the "press agent" for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person.
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It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent — the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, "It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker)."

One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other words, not only is the feeling that we are "consciously" in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. For centuries people have approached the philosophical debate over free will with the vague but powerful intuition that free will does exist; we (the conscious we) are in charge of our behavior. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that this nontrivial chunk of intellectual history can be ascribed fairly directly to natural selection — that one of the most hallowed of all philosophical positions is essentially an adaptation.

The warping effect of reciprocal altruism goes beyond a general belief in our own uprightness. It can also be seen in our skewed social accounting systems. Central to reciprocal altruism is the monitoring of exchanges — the record of whom you owe, who owes you, and how much is owed. From the gene's point of view, monitoring the two sides of the record with equal diligence would be foolish. If you end up getting slightly more than you give, so much the better. But if you give more than you get by even the smallest increment, that's an increment of loss.

That people keep closer track of what they're owed than of what they owe is hardly a news flash from the frontiers of behavioral
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science. It has been so obvious for so long that a century and a half ago it served as the unspoken basis for a little joke Darwin relayed to his sister Caroline. In a letter from the
Beagle
, he wrote of a man who "in one of Lord Byrons [sic] letters is said to be so altered after an illness that his
oldest Creditors
would not know him." Darwin himself amassed some debts in college, and one biographer reports that he "felt rather badly about these debts and, when mentioning his extravagances in after years, seems to have scaled them down by a half."
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Darwin selectively remembered debts of an intellectual sort as well. At a young age, he had read his grandfather Erasmus's writings on evolution. They include a sentence that strikingly anticipates sexual selection, the variant of natural selection that has made males so combative: "The final cause of this contest amongst the males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved." Yet when Darwin included, in the third edition of the
Origin
, a prefatory outline of intellectual precursors, he dismissed his grandfather in a footnote as a pre-Lamarckian harbinger of Lamarck's confusion. And in his
Autobiography
, Darwin spoke disparagingly of Erasmus's
Zoonomia
, the book that, judging by the above quotation, may well have planted in Darwin's mind the seed not only of evolutionism, but of the theory of natural selection. It is a safe bet that Darwin's ever-vigilant conscience wouldn't have let him
consciously
give such short shrift to his own grandfather.

Darwin was not generally remiss in giving intellectual credit. He was selectively remiss. As one biographer wrote, "generous though Darwin always was to those whose empirical observations he found useful, he barely acknowledged those whose ideas had influenced him."
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What a useful pattern. Darwin lavished credit on scores of minor-league researchers, while diminishing the few predecessors who might have been even remote contenders for his crown; he thus incurred the debt of many young, rising scientists, while risking the offense mainly of the old and the dead. All in all, a fairly sound formula for high status. (Of course, the formula itself — "don't credit people who foreshadowed your theory" — isn't written in the genes.
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But there could well be a built-in tendency to refrain from bestowing status-enhancing benefits on people whose status threatens your own.)

The egocentric bias in accounting ranges from the epic to the minor. Wars routinely feature a deep and sure sense of grievance on both sides, a weighty belief in the enemy's guilt. And next-door neighbors, even good friends, can bring comparable conviction to their differing historical records. This fact can get lost in some strata of modern society, where a gloss of cordiality covers everyday life. But there is every reason to believe that through history and prehistory, reciprocal altruism has carried an everyday tension, an implicit or explicit haggling. Bronislaw Malinowski observed that the Trobriand Islanders seemed absorbed in the giving of gifts and were "inclined to boast of their own gifts, with which they are entirely satisfied, while disputing the value and even quarrelling over what they themselves receive."
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