Spoiler alert: It depends.
Context is everything. To understand humans and their behavior, often unique in the animal world, everything is context-dependent and brushing up against the known unknowns of our understanding of ourselves. Such context-dependency has vast implications for addressing the best and worst of human behavior. Professor, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky’s 2017 book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, is an engaging attempt to extricate our behaviors from the trappings of usual explanations, and more boldly, to suggest a new path forward, particularly for our criminal justice system. Intended as an accessible, popular science book that is, nevertheless, still necessarily dense on neuroscience, endocrinology, and proteins — while also serving as a meta analysis expounding upon the debates scientists have about free will vs. determinism, nature vs. nurture, and ancient violence vs. modern violence, among other debates — Sapolsky’s jocular prose ensures it’s an effort not in vain. I enjoyed his book immensely, and as any good book does, it both validated my existing priors and challenged others. My main takeaway, though, whether one tries to put humans into myriad contextual boxes or prime them into certain behaviors, we still remain a confounding species, both at our best and worst.
Sapolsky’s primary background centers around primates; specifically, he spent 30 years in Africa studying baboons. Of course, primates, as well as mice and rats, along with a few other species, offer important insights into our own brains and behaviors. He’s also not shy about being a liberal, but his approach to the criminal justice system goes beyond conventional liberal thinking. I also think he does a fair job, even when revealing his hand, of elucidating and adjudicating the scientific debates, arguments, and shortcomings of those arguments and accompanying research throughout the book. This is one of those books where you want to follow along with the footnotes, not only for those nuances and caveats, but also for his humorous, offhanded comments.
So, the brain. Broadly speaking, there are three layers of the brain: 1.) the ancient part of the brain charged with automatic regulatory functions; 2.) the layer dealing with emotions that then trigger the ancient brain to do a response; and 3.) the layer concerning cognition, memory, and sensory information, which causes lawyer two to feel frightened, causing layer one to shiver. In other words, they can all work in conjunction to generate a response. How to understand our behavior then starts with a baseline point: emotion and cognition are both important. How we feel and how we think. And often, our bodies are reacting before we’ve even consciously realized it, which results in post-hoc rationalization and justification of how we reacted and acted. Moreover, the ancient part of the brain, as we often have memeified now, can be confused: getting our heartrate up when we’re anxious over a test when it normally would have been raised over a lion chasing us. Our brain and our body is constantly looping and looping in the interplay between the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), whereby the SNS produces the adrenaline to speed us up (imagine having to control that while running from a lion!), and the PNS slows us down (like for digestion, which also thankfully isn’t occurring while running from said lion!).
Going deeper into the brain, there are also three regions of importance Sapolsky highlights: a.) the amygdala, which is most responsible for our worst behaviors, the soil in which fear and anxiety germinate, ultimately leading to aggression; b.) the frontal cortex, an equivalent “angel on your shoulder” encouraging you to do the hard thing when it’s the right thing to do (Sapolsky’s definition); any damage to this area, also known as the dlPFC, turns someone hyperaggressive or hypersexual, whereas damage to the emotional part, or vmPFC, makes someone inappropriately emotionally detached (a sociopath); both the dlPFC and vmPFC, or rational thinking and emotion, are necessary, as previously mentioned; and c.) the accumbens, or dopamine, i.e, the area of the brain that processes the pleasure we receive from rewards, but it also encompasses schadenfreude, jealousy, and resentment; in fact, one can even become habituated to dopamine, meaning, “What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow”; and not surprisingly, humans really are more about the journey than the result or reward, meaning, the anticipation of a reward is often more exciting than the reward itself (the pursuit of happiness!); all of this is essential to understanding motivation. As Sapolsky points out, though, regarding the latter, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of humanity (in my opinion) is that we have the unique ability to purposefully delay gratification (the reward), often even beyond our own mortality, i.e., working to solve a problem we know will not likely be solved in our lifetime.
Going through the layers and regions of the brain, it would be tempting to conclude that it is neurobiology, or the brain, where a behavior begins; rather, the brain is the final common pathway by which all the factors converge to create behavior. The implication is one of determinism and not overindexing the idea of free will. But what about genes? Aren’t genes destiny? The deterministic drivers of all human behavior? It’s a touchy subject given the way in which such a viewpoint has been wielded in the past (eugenics), but the short answer, not really, according to Sapolsky. Genes are regulated by incarnations of the environment; you can’t say what a gene does, only what it does in the environment in which it’s been studied and within the network of other genes. In other words, returning to a main point of Sapolsky’s book, it depends. Or to put it in his fun way, “Instead of causes, biology is repeatedly about propensities, potentials, vulnerabilities, predispositions, proclivities, interactions, modulations, contingencies, if/then clauses, context dependencies, exacerbation or diminution of preexisting tendencies.”
One thing humans do not like is uncertainty and ambiguity. However, as game theory studies have repeatedly shown, we do enjoy calculated risks, which I think also speaks to the happiness derived from the pursuit of a reward, or a calculated risky reward, in this case. The unfortunate irony for all species, including humans, is that one way to reduce stress is stress-induced displacement aggression. For primates, that may look like a monkey who just lost a fight then bullying the monkey below him. We know that exact dynamic exists in humans, whereby we take our aggression (stress) out on someone unrelated to what originated the stress in the first place.
Testosterone does seem like the beginning point for aggression. It at least gets all the press for it. But not quite. Social learning is more a determinant of aggression than one’s testosterone levels. Of course, all of this context-dependent again. On the flip side, the one with the positive press, oxytocin, is also importantly socially determined and context-dependent. For example, while oxytocin can make us prosocial within our in-group, it can make us racist and xenophobic toward an outgroup, engendering the classic Us vs. Them dichotomy. (One of the more fascinating features of the Us vs. Them dichotomy is that sometimes it’s not even about Us doing well per se, but about Them doing bad, or that, if Us is bad, at least it’s still better than Them. The past 10 years in U.S. domestic policy can be viewed through such a lens.) I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention the much studied effects of kids witnessing violence in media. While it is true that “heavy childhood exposure to media violence predicts higher levels of aggression in young adults of both sexes,” (emphasis mine) there are two important caveats: a.) catastrophically violent individuals (Sapolsky uses mass shooters as an example) are not the way they are because of childhood exposure to violent media; and most important, b.) exposure does not guarantee increased aggression, which is to say, the effects are strongest on kids already prone toward violence. To use a loaded word, I’ve always harbored an institution that those already violent are attracted to violent media because it just makes sense on the face of it. The only point I would add is that if you charted the ubiquity of violent media in my lifetime, so, since 1990, you would likely see an upward swing, especially with the proliferation of video games. However, if you then charted alongside it the crime rate in the United States, you would see it go from historical highs to historical lows. I find that particularly compelling! (I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the controversial theory for why crime dropped in the U.S. in the 1990s, contrary to expectations: legalized abortions, i.e., a predictor of a life of crime is being born to a mother who doesn’t want you, and if she had a choice, would not have had you. Oof.) All that said, here’s how Sapolsky would have us think about childhood effects on adult behavior: little in childhood determines an adult behavior, but virtually everything in childhood changes propensities toward some adult behavior. So, childhood matters. Childhood adversity can make for damaged and damaging adults (and the two are not always interchangeable!).
Remarkably, the brain is adaptable, able to rewire and even regenerate new neurons in adults (adult neurogenesis), and it’s this plasticity I find so captivating. Sapolsky points out, “Most anything you can measure in the nervous system can change in response to a sustained stimulus and importantly, these changes are often reversible in a different environment.” Context again! I knew about the brain’s plasticity, but I wasn’t aware adults could regenerate new neurons; I figured that you are born with what you have. They maturate (the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until 25, hence, given what I’ve already mentioned, teenagers are associated with more risky behavior), and then as you age, they die and that’s it. I’m glad to know that’s not the case, albeit, Sapolsky offered an aptly depressing footnote to this discussion: the exception to this rule is the atrophy of the hippocampus (memory-making) with long-term major depression, which persists even after the depression is successfully treated. As someone who experienced long-term major depression and considers themselves successfully treated, oof again.
And it’s not just that adolescents and teens are more prone to risk-taking because they’re not as good at risk assessment due to their still-maturing prefrontal cortex, but they are also seeking novelty, which abates the older you get (this is why we think of older people as “set in their ways”), something that isn’t exclusive to humans.
In economics, there’s the notion of revealed preferences, which is that humans will often profess a belief in something or stake out a position, but their action or behavior differs. That is in line with a point Sapolsky makes repeatedly: moral reasoning does not predict moral action, or at least, it does so rarely. I may morally reason one way, but when the time comes, act another. Kohlberg’s three stages of moral development provide illumination here. Let’s use Sapolsky’s example of eating a cookie left out. The preconventional reasoning level stage one is, it depends on if I’m going to be punished for eating the cookie. The second stage is, if I refrain, will I be rewarded? So, at that level, it all depends on reward and punishment. At the conventional reasoning level, stage three, we start considering others: who will be deprived? Do I like them? What would others think of me if I ate the cookie? Stage four considers society writ large: what’s the law? Order is nice. Most adolescents and adults are at this level. The third level is postconventional reasoning. At stage five, we’re thinking far deeper: what circumstances placed the cookie there? Who decided I shouldn’t take it? Yes, order is nice, but is it a just law? Which bleeds into stage six, that one’s moral stance supersedes the law. This is actually egoistic: my inner conscience matters more than the law applied to everyone else, which is another way of saying “being morally good” isn’t always compatible with being a “law-abiding citizen.” Stage six takes that ethos to full bloom. Most don’t reside in stage five or six. Even Kohlberg’s stages of moral development are context-dependent since he only studied Americans (Sapolsky repeatedly points out the difference in individualist cultures, like America, and collectivist cultures, like in East Asia). It also discounts the role the “gut” plays, i.e., intuition and emotion. Moral reasoning isn’t always, well, moral. More often heroism comes from automaticity rather than reasoning. Flipping Sapolsky’s prior refrain: heroism results in doing the right thing when it isn’t the harder thing. We just do it. What helps us to do good? An interesting finding is that cold detachment is necessary. A surgeon would likely be a basket case if they allowed themselves to become emotionally involved in every case they experience. A certain level of cold detachment is necessary for one’s sanity. This “cold-blooded kindness” is what can bridge moral reasoning with moral action. It’s that automaticity again, akin, Sapolsky says, to that which has long since become implicit and automatic, like riding a bike.
So, where does Sapolsky land on criminal justice when trying to apply the science of the book to it? 1.) You’re still going to need to protect people from dangerous people. 2.) There is nothing virtuous about punishment. 3.) Practical issues notwithstanding, we need to move beyond the idea of evil when judging morally disgusting human actions. This is where my priors are validated. The goofy thing is, our criminal justice system is rife with science; it just happens to be junk science. The end point Sapolsky makes is to wonder how future humans will look back on our criminal justice system. Will they see it as laudatory or barbaric in light of necessarily new discoveries in human neuroscience and understandings of the brain? Given that I don’t think it’s laudatory now and the known unknowns to come, I know where I stand on that prediction.
Humans are complex precisely because we are so context-dependent. Everything depends on everything else and in order to properly understand the whole, you have to take into account … the whole. Not just genes, or just the brain, or just evolution, or just hormones, or just proteins, and so on. As a sort of primer, or gateway into the subject, Sapolsky’s book was readable, entertaining, and informative. I’d highly recommend it.
Milam's Musings 