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Explaining our taste for excessive harm
Marc D. Hauser
Viking/Penguin
For Jacques and Bert Hauser,
my parents,
my friends,
and my reminder
that life should be
lived to its fullest
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 2
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
⎯⎯ Plato
To witness suffering does one good, to inflict it even more so.
⎯⎯ Friedrich Nietzsche
Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.
⎯⎯ William Golding
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 3
Dear reader,
Having lived in Uganda and spoken with people who escaped from the savagery of the brutal
dictators Milton Obote and Idi Amin, having heard stories of my father’s childhood as a Jew running
through Nazi occupied France, and reading past and present-day accounts of genocide, I am familiar with
the horrors of evil. I have also been a student of human nature, trained as a scientist. These experiences
have propelled me to study the causes of evil, attempt to make some progress in explaining it to myself,
and hopefully to you. There is a great urgency to understanding this problem. None of us can afford to
passively watch millions of individuals lose their homes, children, and lives as a result of malice. Sloth is
a sin, especially when we live in a world where cultures of evil can so easily erupt.
I am also familiar with and deeply moved by human kindness, our capacity to reach out and help
strangers. When my father was in a boarding school in the south of France, hiding from the Nazis, a little
girl approached him and asked if he was Jewish. My father, conditioned by his parents to deny his
background, said no. The girl, sensing doubt, said “Well, if you are Jewish, you should know that the
director of the school is handing Jewish children over to the Nazis.” My father promptly called his parents
who picked him up, moved him to another village and school, and survived to tell the story. This little girl
expressed one of our species’ signature capacities: the ability to show compassion for another person,
even if their beliefs and desires are different.
In preparation for writing this book, I read transcripts and descriptions of thousands of horrific
events, listened to personal stories of survivors from financial ruin and war, worked with abused children
who were crucified by unfit parents, and watched both fictional films and documentaries that portrayed
psychopaths, dictators of totalitarian regimes, and their hapless victims. As one often does in these
circumstances, I developed a tougher skin over time. But I have never lost track of the human travesties
that result from evil. As my father’s story suggests, I have also not lost sight of the fact that we are a
species that has done great good, and will continue to do so in the future. Nonetheless, to provide a sound
and satisfying explanation of evil we must avoid falling into more romantic interpretations of the human
condition. Our best protection is science. This is the position I will defend.
The topic of evil is massive. This is, however, a short book, written without exhaustive
references, in-depth descriptions of our atrocities, and comprehensive engagement with the many theories
on offer to explain evil. What I offer is my own explanation of evil, of how it evolved, how it develops
within individuals, and how it affects the lives of millions of innocent victims. It is a minimalist
explanation of evil that is anchored in the sciences. I believe, as do many scientists, that deep
understanding of exceptionally complicated phenomena requires staking out a piece of theoretical real
estate with only a few properties, putting to the side many interesting, but potentially distracting details.
This book extracts the core of evil, the part that generates all the variation that our history has catalogued,
and that our future holds.
Sincerely,
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 4
Acknowledgements
I wrote this book while my cat, Humphrey Bogart, sat on my desk, staring at the computer monitor.
Though he purred a lot, and was good value when I needed a break, he didn’t provide a single insight.
Nor did our other pets: a dog, rabbit, and two other cats. For insights, critical comments on my writing,
comfort, and endless love and inspiration, there is only one mammal, deliciously wonderful, and without
an evil bone in her body ⎯⎯ my wife, Lilan.
Marc Aidinoff … a Harvard undergraduate who joined me early on in this journey, digging up
references, collecting data, arguing interpretations, sharing my enthusiasm, while offering his own.
Kim Beeman and Fritz Tsao … my two oldest and closest friends. They have some of the richest
minds around. Their knowledge of film, literature and the arts is unsurpassed. Their capacity to bring
these riches to the sciences is a gift.
Noam Chomsky… for inspiration, fearless attacks on power mongering, and friendship.
Errol Morris… for heated discussion, camaraderie, and insights into evil through his
cinematographic lens and critical mind.
Many colleagues, students, and friends provided invaluable feedback on various parts of the
book, or its entirety: Kim Beeman, Kent Berridge, George Cadwalader, Donal Cahill, Noam Chomsky,
Jim Churchill, Randy Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Jonathan Figdor, Nick Haslam, Omar Sultan Haque, Lilan
Hauser, Bryce Huebner, Ann Jon, Gordon Kraft-Todd, Errol Morris, Philip Pettit, Steven Pinker, Lisa
Pytka, Richard Sosis, Fritz Tsao, Jack Van Honk, and Richard Wrangham.
My agent, John Brockman…not only a great agent but a wonderful human being who supported
me during challenging times.
My editors at Viking/Penguin, Wendy Wolff and Kevin Doughten. Tough when needed.
Supportive when needed. A unique blend. The book is all the better for it.
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 5
Table of Contents
Prologue. Evilution
Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets
Chapter 2. Runaway desire
Chapter 3. Ravages of denial
Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting
Epilogue. Evilightenment
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 6
Prologue:
Evilution
“There is no such thing as eradicating evil [because] the deepest essence of
human nature consists of instinctual impulses which are of an elementary
nature… and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs.”
-- Sigmund Freud
I was drowning. This was not the first time. It was also not because I was a poor swimmer. I was 14
years old. A boy named Lionel James, who was the same age but twice my size, was shoving my head
under water, roaring with laughter as I struggled to gasp some air.
I usually managed to avoid Lionel in the pool, but sometimes he got the best of me while I was
playing with friends. Lionel wasn’t the only one who bullied me in junior high school. He was part of an
evil three pack, including Ronnie Paxton and Chris Joffe, each much larger and stronger than I. Almost
daily they locked me inside of the school’s lockers, bruised my arms by giving me knuckle-punches, and
gave me purple-nurples by twisting my nipples. This was no fun for me. For James, Paxton, and Joffe it
was delicious enjoyment. Sometimes, while I was locked in my locker, my math teacher would let me
out and then ask “Why do you get yourself into these situations?” Though I had great respect for my
teacher’s math abilities, and actually had a crush on her, she was socially daft. Did she think I asked to be
packaged up in the locker by my tormenters? It was sheer humiliation.
One day my mother noticed the bruises. Horrified, she asked what happened. I reluctantly told her
the story. She said we were going to talk with the principal. I told her I would prefer water drip torture.
She understood and we never went to see the principal.
The person who rescued me from my misery was my father, a man who had lived through the war
as a child, running from village to village to escape the Nazis, and in so doing, confronted thuggish farm
boys whose weight far exceeded their IQ. My father, upon hearing that I didn’t want to go to school
anymore, offered a compromise: he would pick me up for lunch every day if I kept going to classes. I
agreed, relishing the idea of escaping the lunch-time scene at school where James, Paxton and Joffe
pummeled me at will without getting caught.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 7
A month passed. I felt better. My father told me that it was time to go back to lunch at school, but
with a plan, one centered around the notion of respect. The only way to command it from my tormenters
was to fight back. “But Dad,” I said, “if I hit them, they will crush me.” “They might,” he said, “but you
will have gained some respect, and they may turn their attention to someone else.” It seemed like a
remarkably stupid idea. But my father lived through a war and fought his way to respect among the thugs
in every village school. I decided to give it a go.
I went back to school. Soon thereafter, I found myself standing behind Paxton who displayed
biceps bigger than my head. I figured I had only one shot. I tapped him on the shoulder and swung as
hard as I could, hitting him square in the chest. What aim. What perfection. What wasted energy. With no
more than a flinch, Paxton looked down at me, fury in his face, and grunted “What’s up with you?” With
tears running and lips trembling, I sputtered “I can’t take it anymore. You, Joffe, and James are constantly
hitting me and locking me in the lockers. I can’t take it!” And then, as if his entire brain had been rewired,
serotonin surging to provide self-control, dopamine flowing to shift his sense of reward, the hulk spoke:
“Really? Okay, we’ll stop.” And just like that, Paxton, Joffe and James stopped. No more locker games,
no more bruises. They even saw me as a useful resource, someone who could help them pass some of
their exams. From victim to victory.
I was fortunate. Many are not. Thousands of children throughout the world are persecuted in a
similar way but never fight back or if they do, are crushed for trying. Some are pushed so hard that they
commit suicide, tragedies that increasingly make headline news reports.
The fact that bullies often torment their victims for personal gain, cause great harm, and often
enjoy the experience ⎯⎯ as did Lionel James ⎯⎯ fits well with a common view of evil. On this view, we
think of someone as evil if they inflict harm on innocent others, knowing that they are violating moral or
legal norms, and relishing the abuse delivered. But what of bullies who, due to immaturity or brain
deficits, simply don’t understand the scope of moral boundaries? What if they impose great harm on their
victims, but don’t enjoy the experience? What if the victims are not entirely innocent, such as those who
double-time as bullies?
We can debate questions like these on philosophical grounds, attempting to refine what, precisely,
counts as an act of evildoing as opposed to some mere moral wrong, like breaking a promise or having an
affair while married. Many have. I don’t believe, however, that this is how we will achieve our deepest
understanding. Instead, I turn to the sciences of human nature, focusing on cases where people directly or
indirectly cause excessive harm to innocent others as the essence of evil. To explain this form of evil, we
must dissect the underlying psychology, the brain circuits that generate this psychology, the genes that
build brains, and the evolutionary history that has sculpted the genetic ensemble that makes us
distinctively human. This is the approach I pursue. If I’m right about this approach, not only will we gain
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 8
a deeper understanding of how and why our species has engaged in evildoing, but we will learn about our
own individual vulnerability to follow suit. This prologue provides a sampling of the central ideas minus
the rich evidence and explanations that follow in the four core chapters of this book.
A brief history of malice
Homo sapiens, the knowing and wise animal, has logged an uncontested record of atrocities,
despite moral norms prohibiting such actions: no other species has abducted innocent children into rogue
armies and then killed those who refused to kill, tossed infants into the air as targets for shooting practice,
gang raped women to force them to carry the enemy’s fetus to term while destroying the souls of their
powerless husbands, and mutilated and burned men to death because more humane forms of killing were
less effective and enjoyable. These are horrific acts. They abound globally and across the ages. Many
scholars have judged them as evil.
Despite the pervasiveness of these atrocities, evil is commonly perceived as a defect, an
unfortunate malignancy that has engulfed and metastasized within our species’ essential goodness. Evil is
also denied, relegated to mythology, the delusional imagination of a few madmen, the propaganda of
imperialist nations, or the result of a rare mutation. Perhaps because of these impressions, we have an
obsessive fascination with evil, evidenced by our fertile capacity to create and then consume films about
genocide, cunning rapists, master criminals, corporate raiders, psychopaths and serial killers. We are of
two minds, wanting to hide from the atrocities of evil while feeding our insatiable appetite for more.
To understand evil is neither to justify nor excuse it, reflexively converting inhumane acts into
mere accidents of our biology or the unfortunate consequences of bad environments. To understand evil is
to open a door into its essence, to clarify its causes. In some cases, understanding may force us to
exonerate the perpetrators, recognizing that they harbored significant brain damage and as a result, lacked
self-control or awareness of others’ pain. In other cases, understanding will reveal that they knowingly
caused harm to innocent others, relishing the devastation left behind. By describing and understanding an
individual’s character with the tools of science, we are more likely to make appropriate assignments of
responsibility, blame, punishment, and future risk to society.
To understand evil requires facing our species’ sustained record of atrocities, laying out a variety
of cases for inspection. Former Reverend Lawrence Murphy was responsible for over two hundred
instances of sexual abuse, luring innocent deaf children in with a saintly smile. Charles Manson, the
illegitimate son of a sixteen year old woman and the self-proclaimed father of dozens of runaway women,
was responsible for the brutal death of five people by means of 114 knife jabs, while also prostituting his
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 9
lovers, beating his wife, selling drugs, and stealing cars. Former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock
exchange, Bernard Madoff, was responsible for initiating a Ponzi scheme involving money laundering,
perjury, and mail fraud that caused thousands of people to suffer financial ruin. Jane Toppan, born
Honora Kelley, was an American nurse who was responsible for killing over 30 patients by drug
overdose, stating in her testimony that she experienced a sexual thrill when she held dying patients, and
that her goal in life was to kill more innocent people than anyone else in history. Former military
specialist Charles Granger was responsible for forcing nudity and sex among the Iraqi prisoners of Abu
Ghraib, putting individuals on dog leashes, depriving them of their senses with head bags, and piling
naked bodies into photographed still lifes, orchestrations that led to the ultimate humiliation and
dehumanization of these prisoners.
Depending upon how we think about the problem of evil, we might consider the individuals noted
above as minor evildoers or not evil at all because the harms were rather insignificant, because their goal
wasn’t to directly harm anyone and then enjoy the trail of damage, or because they lacked the mental
capacity to assume responsibility for the atrocities committed. These individuals pale in comparison with
the most unambiguously radical evildoers of the 20-21 st century ⎯⎯ the dictators Idi Amin, Francisco
Franco, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-il, Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Charles Taylor, and Mao
Zedong. These men were responsible for the brutal deaths of approximately 80 million people combined.
Most were mentally healthy, at least in terms of clinical diagnoses. Many relished their atrocities. All
devised over-the-top means of ending lives. Whether by enticing or coercing their followers to torture,
gang rape, and butcher human flesh, they went beyond what was necessary to get rid of unwanted others.
These are excessive harms, carried out with excessive techniques. In this book, I will not only explore
these extreme cases, but more mundane ones as well. Each case helps shape our understanding of what
propells some individuals to cause harm on small or large scales, while others avoid it entirely, despite
temptations to the contrary.
Why and How?
To explain the landscape of human atrocities, from Reverend Lawrence Murphy to Mao Zedong, we need
an account of why we evolved this capacity and how it works. I will explain both of these problems using
the theories and evidence of science.
Why? Evil evolved as an incidental consequence of our unique form of intelligence. All animals
show highly specialized abilities to solve problems linked to survival. Honey bees perform dances to tell
others about the precise location of nutritious pollen, providing an information highway that lowers the
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 10
costs of individual foraging challenges. Meerkats teach their young how to hunt dangerous but energyrich
scorpion prey, providing an education that bypasses the risks of trial and error learning. Humans
unconsciously wrinkle their noses and pull back their lips into an expression of disgust that communicates
information about disease-ridden and toxic substances, thereby lowering the costs of sickness to others
who might be exposed. Each of these specializations involve exquisitely designed neural circuits and
sensory machinery. Each specialization is used for one and only one problem ⎯⎯ except in humans.
Animal thoughts and emotions are like monogamous relationships, myopically and faithfully focused on a
single problem for life. Human thoughts and emotions are like promiscuous relationships, broad-minded
and liberated, free to couple as new problems surface.
Unlike any other animal, the thoughts and emotions we use to solve problems in one domain can
readily be combined and recombined with thoughts and emotions from other domains. This is powerful,
providing great flexibility in addressing novel problems, some of which we create for ourselves. Disgust
provides an example. Disgust originally evolved as an adaptive response to detecting substances that are
toxic to our health, especially substances that are outside of the body but should be inside: feces, urine,
blood, and vomit. Within the circulation of a promiscuous brain, however, disgust journeys to distant
problems, including the moral attitude of vegetarians toward meat eaters, our revulsion toward incest, and
abhorrence of gratuitous torture. This journey involves the same brain mechanism that serves original
disgust, together with new connections that give voice to our moral sense. Promiscuity enables creativity.
What the sciences reveal is that the capacity for promiscuous thinking was realized by
evolutionary changes in the number of newly wired up brain areas. By increasing these connections, it
was possible, for the first time, to step outside the more narrow and specialized functions of each
particular brain area to solve a broader range of problems. Though we don’t know precisely when these
changes occurred, we know they occurred after our split from the other great apes ⎯⎯ the orangutans,
gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees. We know this from looking at both the brains of these species, as
well as the ways in which they use tools, communicate, cooperate, and attack each other. Not only are
there fewer connections between different regions of the brain, but their thinking in various domains is
highly monogamous, faithfully dedicated to specific adaptive problems.
Empowered by our new, massively connected and promiscuous brain, we alone migrated into and
inhabited virtually every known environment on earth and some beyond, inventing abstract mathematical
concepts, conceiving grammatically structured languages, and creating glorious civilizations rich in
rituals, laws, and beliefs in the supernatural. Our promiscuous brain also provided us with the engine for
evil, but only as an incidental consequence of other adaptive capacities, including those that evolved to
harm others for the purpose of surviving and reproducing.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 11
All social animals fight to gain resources, using highly ritualized behaviors to assess their
opponents and minimize the personal costs of injury. Changes in hormone levels and brain activity
motivate and reward the winners, and minimize the costs to the losers. In a small corner of the landscape
of aggressive fighting styles are an elite group of killers, animals that go beyond harming their opponents
to obliterating them: ants, wolves, lions, and chimpanzees. When these species attack to kill, they
typically target adult members of neighboring groups, using collaborative alliances to take out lone or
otherwise vulnerable victims. The rarity and limited scope of this form of lethal aggression is indicative
of monogamous thinking, and tells us something important about the economics ⎯⎯ especially the costs
and potential rewards of eliminating the enemy, as opposed to merely injuring them. Killing another adult
is costly because it involves intense, prolonged combat with another individual who is fighting back. The
risks of significant personal injury are therefore high, even if the potential benefit is death to an opponent.
As the British anthropologist Richard Wrangham has suggested, animals can surmount these costs by
attacking and killing only when there is a significant imbalance of power. This imbalance minimizes the
costs to the killers and maximizes the odds of a successful kill. Still, the rarity of killing reinforces an
uncontested conclusion among biologists: all animals would rather fight and injure their opponents than
fight and obliterate them, assuming that obliteration is costly to the attacker. In some cases, we are just
like these other animals ⎯⎯ killophobic.
Historical records, vividly summarized by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman in his book On
Killing, reveal that in some situations, soldiers avoid killing the enemy even though they could have. For
example, despite the fact that Civil War regiments had the potential to kill 500-1000 individuals per
minute, the actual rate was only 1-2 per minute. This suggests that under some conditions, killing another
when you can see the whites of their eyes is hard. But as the history of genocides reveal, we have
evolved ways to bypass this limitation, making us killophilic in a variety of situations. Our brain’s unique
capacity for denial is one of the liberating factors.
By recruiting denial into our psychology’s artillery, we invented new ways of perceiving the
enemy or creating one, distorting reality in the service of feeding a desire for personal gain. Denial, like
so many aspects of our psychology, generates beneficial and toxic consequences. Self-deceiving
ourselves into believing that we are better than we are is a positive illusion that often has beneficial
consequences for our mental and physical health, and for our capacity to win in competition. Denying
others their moral worth by reclassifying them as threats to our survival or as non-human objects is toxic
thinking. When we deny others their moral worth, the thought of killing them is no longer aversive or
inappropriate. If we end someone’s life in defense of our own, we are following our evolved capacity for
survival. When we destroy a parasite, we are also protecting our self-interests to survive. And when we
destroy an inanimate object or lock it away, there is no emotional baggage because we have bypassed the
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 12
connection to individual rights; we have cut out morality as the governor. This suite of transformations,
enabled by our promiscuous brain, allowed us to occupy a unique position within the animal kingdom as
large scale killers.
Chimpanzees only kill adults when there are many attackers against one victim, with the vast
majority of kills focused on individuals outside of their own group; most kills within the group are aimed
at infants, where the costs to the attacker are low. Though humans also kill members of enemy groups
when there are many against one ⎯⎯ a pattern that is common among hunter-gatherers and other smallscale
societies ⎯⎯ we depart from this narrow pattern in terms of numbers and the array of potential
victims. When humans kill, we go at it with many against many, one against one, and even one against
many, including as victims both those outside of our group and those within, young and old, same and
opposite sex, and mating partner and competitor.
Add the chimpanzee’s adaptive capacity for coalitionary killing to the promiscuous capacity of
the human brain, and we arrive at a uniquely aggressive species, one capable of inflicting great harm on
others in any context. Though the modern invention of scud missiles and stealth bombers undoubtedly
enriched our capacity to kill on a large scale by putting distance between killers and victims, these
weapons of mass destruction were not necessary. Today, we need only travel back a few years to 1994 to
witness the machete genocides of Rwanda, a painful memory of our capacity to wipe out close to a
million people in 100 days with hand to hand combat. This is excessive harm, enabled by our ability to
use denial to minimize the perceived costs of killing another person and to motivate the anticipated
benefits. Denial turns down the heat of killing another and turns us into callous predators.
Evolutionary changes in the connections to the brain’s reward system provided a second, costoffsetting
step, allowing us to move into novel arenas for harming others. When an animal wins a fight,
the reward circuitry engages, providing a physiological pat on the back and encouragement for the next
round. This same circuitry even engages in anticipation of a battle or when watching winners. The
reward system is important as it motivates competitive action in situations that are costly. There is one
situation, however, where the reward system is remarkably quiet, at least in all social animals except our
own: detecting and punishing those who attempt to cheat and free-ride on others’ good will.
Punishment carries clear costs, either paid up front in terms of resources expended on physically
or psychologically attacking another, or paid at the end if the victim fights back or retaliates. These costs
can be offset if punishers and their group benefit by removing cheaters or teaching them a lesson. Among
animals, punishment is infrequently seen in vertebrates, especially our closest relatives the nonhuman
primates. When it is seen, the most common context is competition, not cooperation. Like lethal killing,
then, punishment in animals tends to be restricted to a narrow context. Like lethal killing, punishment in
animals is psychologically monogamous.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 13
Punishment in humans is emblematically promiscuous. We castigate others whenever they
violate a social norm, in both competitive and cooperative situations, targeting kin and non-kin.
Punishment is doled out by the individual directly harmed and also by third party onlookers. We use both
physical and non-physical means to discipline cheaters, including ostracism. Punishment’s landscape is
vast.
The idea I develop here, building on the work of scholars in economics, psychology, and
anthropology, is that our species alone circumvented the costs of punishment as an incidental
consequence of promiscuity, including an intimate coupling between the systems of aggression and
reward. As several brain imaging studies reveal, when we either anticipate or actually punish another, or
even witness punishment as a mere bystander, our reward circuitry delivers a honey hit. Delivering just
deserts, or watching them delivered, is like eating dessert. We absorb the costs of punishment by feeling
good about ratting out the scourges, banishing them from society, and sometimes from life itself.
Ironically, as the economist Samuel Bowles has suggested based on mathematical models and a synthesis
of the historical record, punishment can strengthen solidarity and cooperation within the group, while
simultaneously enhancing antagonism and prejudice toward those outside the inner sanctum. Ironically,
the psychology that benefited cooperation among like-minded others may also have functioned to destroy
those who have different beliefs and values.
The emergence of promiscuous punishment was a momentous event in human history, a
celebration of exquisite brain evolution and adaptive design. But this achievement carried a hidden cost, a
debt that we continue to pay: A mind capable of feeling good about punishing in the name of virtue is a
mind capable of doing bad to feel good. It is a mind that finds real or simulated violence entertaining and
seeks ways to satisfy this interest. It is a mind that enjoys watching others suffer while singing O
Schadenfreude. It is a mind that is capable of feeling good about killing others who are perceived as
parasitic on society. It is a mind that can override the anticipated costs of killing by fueling a taste for
killing.
Desire, denial, aggression and reward are each associated with specific psychological processes,
distinct evolutionary histories, and specific adaptive problems. When processed by a promiscuous brain,
these systems connect in ways that are both beneficial to human welfare and deeply deleterious.
How? Evil occurs when individuals and societies allow desire for personal gain to combine with
the denial of others’ moral worth to justify the use of excessive harms. Everyone has desires, resources
they want and experiences they seek. Our desires motivate us into action, often to fulfill personal needs or
to help others. We all desire good health, fulfilling relationships, and knowledge to explain the world.
Some also desire great wealth and power, each culture weighing in on its signature vision of what counts:
money, land, livestock, wives, and subordinates. The desire system motivates action in the service of
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 14
rewarding experiences. Some actions have benign or even beneficial consequences for the welfare of
others, while others have malignant and costly consequences.
Exquisite studies pioneered by the American cognitive neuroscientist Kent Berridge have
uncovered the core elements of pleasure, including distinctive systems of wanting, liking and learning.
We, and hundreds of other species, often want things we like, and like things we want. This is, obviously,
an adaptive coupling. Thanks to experiments at the level of genes, neurons, and behavior, we can tease
apart these three systems. Thanks to naturally occurring situations, we can watch these systems come
unglued over the course of addictions, leading to the paradoxical and maladaptive situation of wanting
more and more, but liking the experience less and less. Addictions, as archetypal examples of excess,
provide a model for thinking about evil and its trademark signature of excessive harm.
The paradoxical decoupling between wanting and liking is seen most clearly in studies of obesity
in rats and humans, where individuals develop skyrocketing desires for food, but fail to experience
comparable pleasure from eating. By definition, those who become obese are prone to eat in excess. One
reason they do is because eating, or even seeing images of food, no longer delivers the same honey hit to
the brain as in their pre-obesity days. The reward system turns off when we turn to excess. This is
adaptive because nothing in excess is good. But because the wanting system runs independently, the
adaptive response by the liking system has the unfortunate consequence of making us want more even
though we enjoy it less. The proposal I develop in this book is that the same process is involved in evil,
especially its expression of excessive harm. It is a process that is aided by denial.
Everyone engages in denial, negating certain aspects of reality in order to manage painful
experiences or put forward a more powerful image. But like desire, denial has both beneficial and costly
consequences for self and others. When we listen to the news and hear of human rights violations across
the globe, we often hide our heads in the sand, plug our ears, and carry on with our lives as if all is okay
on planet Earth. When doctors have to engage in slicing into human flesh to perform surgery, they turn
off their compassion for humanity, treating the body as a mechanical device, at least until the surgery is
over, and the patient awakes, speaks and smiles. When we confront a challenging opponent in an athletic
competition or military confrontation, we often pump ourselves up, tricking our psychology into believing
that we are better than we are. Denial turns down the heat of emotion, allowing a cooler approach to
decision making and action. But doctors in denial concerning the moral worth of others can be convinced
to carry out heinous operations for the “good” of science or the purity of their group, and military leaders
in denial of an opponent’s strength can lead their soldiers to annihilation. Individuals in denial can reject
different aspects of reality in the service of reward, whether it is personal gain, avoiding pain, or enabling
the infliction of pain on others.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 15
In a competitive world with limited resources, our desire system never rests. This is a good thing
as it motivates us to take care of our self-interests and strive for bigger and better. But a desire system
that never sleeps is a system that is motivated to accrue ever larger coffers or power. To satisfy this
inflationary need is often not possible without harming others, either directly or indirectly. To offset the
costs of harming another, desire recruits denial. This is a recipe for evil and the creation of excessive
harms. It is a recipe that takes two, often benign and highly adaptive ingredients that are essential for
motivating action and promoting survival, and combines them into an explosive outcome. Seen in this
way, our capacity for evil is as great as our capacity for love and compassion. Evil is part of human
nature, a capacity that can’t be denied. What I will show is both how this capacity works, and how some
of us, due to biological inheritance and environmental influence, are more likely to end up as evildoers.
Historical material on the lives of Franz Stangl and Adolf Eichmann, leaders in the Nazi
annihilation of Jews, illustrates how desire and denial combine within individual minds to create
excessive harms. Although this is a historical example, focused on the lives of only two men, stories like
theirs have been recounted hundreds of times, all over the globe and across time. This pattern points to
common mechanisms, identified in detail by the sciences of human nature.
Stangl was a politically motivated man with a burning desire to climb to the top of the Nazi
hierarchy. A clear path opened when he was appointed commander of the Polish prison Treblinka.
Unbeknownst to Stangl, Treblinka was one of the Nazi’s concentration death camps. To fulfill his desire
for power therefore required harming thousands of others, or more accurately, commanding Nazi soldiers
to harm others on his behalf. But since Stangl had no burning desire to harm the Jews, he dehumanized
them, transforming living, breathing, feeling, and thinking people into lifeless “cargo” ⎯⎯ his own
expression. Stangl was dry-eyed as officers under his command killed close to one million Jews, one
third of them children. The reward? Power and status within the Nazi hierarchy. The death of innocent
Jews was a foreseen consequence of Stangl’s desire for power, not his direct goal.
Eichmann, Lieutenant Colonel in the Nazi regime, was considered one of the central architects of
the Final Solution, the master plan for the extermination of Jews. Eichmann denied Jews their humanity
by championing the pamphlets and posters that portrayed them as vermin and parasites. This
dehumanizing transformation empowered Eichmann’s belief that cleansing was the only solution to
German integrity and power. Eichmann’s reward? Elimination of the Jews. Unlike Stangl, killing Jews
was rewarding. As the historian Yaacov Lozowick stated “Eichmann and his ilk did not come to murder
Jews by accident or in a fit of absent-mindedness, nor by blindly obeying orders or by being small cogs in
a big machine. They worked hard, thought hard, took the lead over many years. They were the alpinists of
evil.”
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 16
Stangl and Eichmann: two different routes into evil. Both possible and both equally lethal to
humanity.
This is a lean explanation of why evil evolved and how it develops within individuals and
societies. It is an explanation that strips evil down to its root causes, focusing on the core psychological
ingredients that enable us to violate moral norms and cause excessive harms to innocent others.
A difficult journey
This book takes you on a journey into evil. It is a story about our evolutionary past, our present state of
affairs, and the prospects for our future. It is as much a story about you and me, as it is about all of our
ancestors and future children. It is a story about the nature of moral decay and the prospects of moral
growth. It is story about society’s capacity to engineer great harm, and about our own individual
responsibility to avoid joining in.
Explaining how our genes create brains that create a psychology of desire and denial that leads to
excessive harms provides a satisfying explanation for the landscape of evil. It explains all varieties of evil
by showing how particular genetic combinations can create moral monsters and how particular
environmental conditions can convert good citizens into uncaring killers and extortionists. This
explanation will not allow us to banish evil from the world. Rather, it will enable us to understand why
some individuals acquire an addiction to feeling good by making others feel bad, and why others cause
unimaginable harm to innocent victims while flying the flag of virtue. This, in turn, will help us gain
greater awareness of our own vulnerabilities by monitoring the power of attraction between desire and
denial.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 17
Endnotes: Prologue. Evilution
Recommended books:
There are numerous books about evil, most written by philosophers, theologians, historians, political
scientists, and legal scholars. The following recommendations are for books about evil written by
scientists. They are terrific, I have learned a great deal from them, and some of their ideas powerfully
enrich the pages between these covers.
Baumeister, R. F. (1999). Evil. Inside human violence and cruelty. New York, W.H. Freeman.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The Science of Evil. New York, Basic Books.
Oakley, B. (2007). Mean Genes. New York, Prometheus Books.
Staub, E. (2010). Overcoming Evil. New York, Oxford University Press.
Stone, M. H. (2009). The Anatomy of Evil. New York, Prometheus Books.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect. New York, Random House.
Notes:
• For a philosophical account of the nature of goodness that treats evil as a deviation from our species’
repertoire, see Philippa Foot Natural Goodness (2001, Oxford, Clarendon Press).
• For an explicit, philosophical argument for the connection between pleasure and evil, see Colin
McGinn‘s Ethics, Evil and Fiction (1997, Oxford, Oxford University Press). For a comprehensive
discussion of evil by a philosopher, including important critiques of the existing literature, see John
Kekes’ The Roots of Evil (2007, Ithaca, Cornell University Press)
• On killing throughout history: Wrangham, R.W. & Glowacki, L. (in press). Intergroup aggression in
chimpanzees and war in nomadic hunter-gatherers: evaluating the chimpanzee model. Human Nature;
Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social
behaviors? Science, 324, 1293-1298; Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial
altruism and war. Science, 318, 636-640; Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: the psychological costs of
learning to kill in war and society. New York, NY: Little, Brown.
• For a summary of research on desire, especially the elements of wanting, liking and learning, see
Berridge, K.C. (2009). Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience and Psychology
Laboratory. Inquiry, 52(4), 378-398; Kringelbach, M.L., & Berridge, K.C. (2009). Towards a functional
neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness. Trends Cognitive Science 13(1), 479-487.
• The most serious treatment of Stangl can be found in the penetrating interview by Gitta Sereny (1974,
Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. London: Random House). There have been
different treatments of Adolf Eichmann, most famously by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem:
A report on the banality of evil. (1963, New York, Viking Press). Arendt’s perspective on Eichmann as
an ordinary gentleman who simply followed orders has been seriously challenged, suggesting that he was
anything but a banal evildoer; the quote by Holocaust scholar Yaacov Lozowick is one illustration of the
more generally accepted view that Eichmann was a radical evildoer with heinous intentions to
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 18
exterminate the Jews. He may have lived a calm and peaceful existence outside of his day job at Nazi
headquarters, but this was no ordinary citizen.
Quotes:
• Quote by Lozowick on Eichmann and banality of evil: Lozowick, Y. (2002) Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The
Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil. New York, Continuum Press, p. 279.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 19
Chapter 1:
Nature’s secrets
Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.
— Albert Einstein
In Charles Darwin’s day, biologists unearthed the mysteries of evolution by means of observation,
sometimes accompanied by a simple experiment. This was largely a process of documenting the patterns
of variation and uniformity that nature left behind. Only breeders were directly involved in manipulating
these patterns, using artificial selection to alter the size, shape, coloration, and lifespan of plants and
animals.
The Darwins of today continue this tradition, but with new tools, informed by understanding of
the genetic code and aided by technical developments in engineering, physics, chemistry, and computer
science. These tools allow for deeper penetration into the sources of change, and the causes of
evolutionary similarities and differences. They also enable biologists to change the course of evolution
and the patterns of development by turning genes off or turning novel ones on, and even creating
synthetic organisms in test tubes ⎯⎯ a wonderful playground for understanding both questions of origin,
change, and extinction.
The Darwins of today are cowboys, trailblazing a new frontier of understanding. But like the
frontier of the early American wild west, nature holds many secrets and surprises. Sometimes when we
break through nature’s guard, we gain fundamental truths about the living world, knowledge that can be
harnessed to improve animal and human welfare. But sometimes when we break through, we create toxic
consequences and ethical dilemmas. Tampering with nature is risky business as there are many hidden
and unforeseen consequences.
In 1999, the molecular biologist Joe Tsien and his team at Princeton University tampered with
mother nature. Their discovery, published in a distinguished scientific journal, soon filled the
newspapers, radio airwaves, and even a spot on Dave Letterman’s late night television show. Tsien
manipulated a gene that was known to influence memory, causing it to work over time. This created a
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 20
new line of mice with a special accessory: an upgraded memory and learning system. When these new
and improved mice ran through an IQ test, they outperformed normal mice.
Tsien pulled off an extraordinary engineering trick, creating a lineage of smarter mice. This is
cowboy science, showing the power of genetic tampering to open the door to evolutionary changes. In a
world of competition, one would imagine that selection should favor these smart mice who have better
recall of essential foraging routes, previous social interactions, and places to rest out of harm’s way from
predators. But in biology, there are always trade-offs. Benefits in one area of life are often accompanied
by costs in others.
Several months after Tsien’s report, a follow-up study of the same memory-enhanced mice
appeared in print, also in a distinguished scientific journal. But this time there was no media fanfare. The
new work was carried out by Min Zhuo at Washington University, an ex-member of Tsien’s lab and a coauthor
of the original paper. Zhuo’s new paper confirmed that memory-enhanced mice were indeed
smarter, but also showed that they were more sensitive to pain, licking their wounds more and for longer
periods of time than normal mice. Though it is unclear whether Zhuo’s results reveal heightened pain
sensitivity, stronger memories for pain, or some combination of these and other processes, what is clear is
that the engineering that led to smarter mice led to much more.
Tsien and Zhuo’s work shows that even with targeted, artificial changes in the underlying
biology, unanticipated consequences are common. It also shows that deep within the biology of every
organism lies hidden capacities and potential for change. Unleashing these sub rosa capacities can have
both beneficial and costly consequences for the individual and group.
The idea I develop in this chapter is that our capacity for evil evolved as an incidental, but natural
consequence of our uniquely engineered brain. Unlike any other species, our brain promiscuously
combines and recombines thoughts and emotions to create a virtually limitless range of solutions to an
ever-changing environment. This new form of intelligence enabled us to solve many problems, but two
are of particular interest given their adaptive consequences: killing competitors and punishing cheaters in
a diversity of contexts. But like the painful fall-out from artificially engineering a smarter mouse, so too
was there fall-out from the natural engineering of a smarter human: a species that experiences pleasure
from harming others. This is part of the recipe for evil.
This chapter sets out the evidence to support the idea that evil evolved as an incidental
consequence of our brain’s design. I begin by discussing the two general processes that landed us in the
unforeseen and uninhabited niche of evildoers: the evolution of byproducts and promiscuous connections
within the human brain. Because these are general processes, we will take a short reprieve from matters
specifically evil.
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 21
What’s it for?
About 50 million years ago, a family of insects ⎯⎯ the Phylliinae ⎯⎯ evolved a distinctive piece of
anatomy: a body that looks like a leaf. They also evolved the capacity for catalepsy or statuesque
stillness. Their leafy body is so exquisitely designed that even predators with superb search images are
fooled as they walk or fly by. But from the fact that the leafy body provides these insects with an
invisibility cloak, and the fact that this enables them to escape predation, we cannot conclude that the
leafy body evolved for predator evasion. What something is used for today may be different from what it
evolved for ⎯⎯ the difference between current utility and original function. To show that the leafy body
evolved for predator evasion, we need to know more, which we do. For one, the leafy body is paired up
with a requisite behavioral adaptation: turning to stone. If leaf insects fluttered about as actively as any
other insect, their motion alone would cry out to the predators. Optimal effectiveness requires acting like
a leaf. But acting like a leaf without the leafy body has its own independent benefits, paying off in terms
of predator evasion, as well as sneaking up on potential mates. It would therefore make good sense if
stillness evolved first followed by a leafy body. This is precisely what evolution’s record reveals.
The adaptive advantage that comes from statuesque stillness and a leafy camouflage can only be
measured against the backdrop of today’s predator line-up. If some future-predator evolves more
sophisticated abilities to discriminate real leaves from faux leaves, the Phylliinae will be out of luck. This
new pressure from predators will, in turn, push for new evasive tricks, thus initiating the classic cycle of
predator-prey evolution. What is adaptive for the Phylliinae today, may not be adaptive tomorrow.
The comparative study of the Phylliinae raises a class of questions posed by all evolutionary
biologists, independently of their taxonomic biases or interests in physiology, morphology, or behavior:
How did it originally evolve? What adaptive problem did it solve? Did it evolve to solve one adaptive
problem, but over time shift to solve another ⎯⎯ a case of what the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J.
Gould referred to as an exaptation? Does the exaptation generate profits or losses for survival and
reproduction? Is the trait associated with byproducts, incidental consequences of the evolutionary
process? What effects, if any, do these byproducts have on survival and reproduction? These questions
apply with equal force to evil as they do to language, music, mathematics, and religion. The fact that evil,
relative to a leafy body, is more difficult to define, harder to measure, and impossible to experiment upon
⎯⎯ at least ethically ⎯⎯ doesn’t mean we should take it off the table of scientific inquiry. What it means is
that we must be clear about what we can understand, and how we can distinguish between the various
interpretations on offer. When we explore the evolution of evil, what are we measuring and what evidence
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 22
enables us to distinguish between adaptive and non-adaptive explanations? To answer this question, let us
look at two illustrative examples that are more challenging than leafy coverage in insects: the evolution of
tameness and religion.
Sheep, goats, cows, cats, and dogs are all domesticated animals, created by the forces of artificial
selection. All have been transformed from a wild type to an animal that not only lives with us, but
sometimes lives for us as food. All are more relaxed, less fearful, and less stressed in the presence of
humans than their wild ancestors. Many of these animals seek human companionship. These are the
trademark features of tameness. They are also consistently associated with other features that never
entered into the breeder’s calculations: floppier ears, curlier tails, more mottled fur, greater sensitivity to
human communication, reduced response to predators, earlier sexual maturation, smaller brains, and
higher levels of serotonin — a chemical messenger of the brain that regulates self-control. Some of these
features appear directly relevant to tameness, whereas others appear entirely irrelevant. For example,
serotonin is critically linked to self-control which is critically linked to an animal’s ability to suppress
aggression when threatened, which is critically linked to building a life with humans. Mottled fur is not
critically linked to any of these benefits.
Domestication leads to a pastiche of characteristics, some indicative of the domesticator’s goals
and others orthogonal to it. How does the process of domestication, and artificial selection in particular,
generate both desired and unanticipated traits?
In most cases of animal domestication, we know little about how the wild type changed because
the only available information is either anecdotal or based on loose archaeological reconstructions.
Consider the domestication of dogs from wolves, and especially the variability among dog breeds.
Though it is clear that humans throughout history have bred dogs to serve particular functions, including
herding, aggressive defense, and companionship, each of these personality styles is linked to other
behavioral and physiological traits. For example, breeds with high activity levels are smaller than breeds
with low activity levels, aggressive breeds have higher metabolic rates than docile breeds, and obedient
breeds live longer than disobedient breeds. Does selection for aggressiveness cause an increase in
metabolic rate or does selection for higher metabolic rate allow for heightened aggressiveness. Because
these are all correlations, we don’t know which trait pushed the other to change or whether both traits
were favored at the same time.
There are two situations that provide a more clear-cut understanding of which feature was favored
by selection and which emerged as an incidental byproduct: controlled experiments and domestication
efforts that resulted in unambiguously undesirable traits. In the 1950s, the Russian biologist Dmitry
Belyaev set out to domesticate the wild silver fox. Over several generations, he selectively bred those
individuals who were most likely to allow a human experimenter to approach and hand them food. After
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 23
45 years of selective breeding he got what he aimed for: a population of tame foxes, less fearful of
humans and more interested in playing with them. But Belyaev also got much more than he aimed for:
these tame foxes had floppier ears, curlier tails, smaller brains, higher serotonin levels, and much sharper
social skills than their wild relatives. These tame foxes acquired the same package that virtually all other
domesticated mammals had acquired: some desired and desirable traits and some surprises.
Belyaev’s study shows that even under highly controlled laboratory conditions, artificial selection
leaves a trail of unanticipated consequences, traits that come along for the ride. This link between desired
and unanticipated features arises because the genes that create these features are like coupled oscillators:
changes in the expression of one gene directly link to changes in the expression of others. At the level of
the traits ⎯⎯ the gene’s expressions ⎯⎯ some have no impact on survival or reproduction, while others may
increase or decrease these aspects of fitness. We can illustrate this point by looking at an example from
dog breeders.
Several hundred years ago, dog breeders used artificial selection to create snub-nosed breeds such
as the pug, bull dog, and boxer. The idea was to satisfy our aesthetics for diminutive noses, and reduce
the size of the dog’s classically large protuberance. Over the course of several generations of picking the
smallest-nosed members of the litter, pugs, bull dogs, and boxers emerged. But they also emerged with
an unanticipated and maladaptive health problem: all of these breeds have a harder time breathing and
staying cool than full-nosed or snouty dogs. No breeder would select for respiratory problems or an
inability to stay cool. These traits emerged as costly byproducts of selection for a diminutive nose, and
more abstractly, as a byproduct of our aesthetics. As in Tsien’s experiments on memory enhanced mice,
when we tamper with nature, we can cause great harm.
Research on the evolution of religion provides my second example of how to think about
adaptations and byproducts. The different types of religion are like the different dog breeds: distinctive in
many ways, but with a large number of shared traits in common. Most religions have a set of rules for
group membership and expulsion, ritual practices, and beliefs in the supernatural. These commonalities
suggest to some scholars that religion evolved to solve a particular problem, one that all humans confront.
That problem is large scale cooperation among unrelated strangers, a topic I pick up in greater detail
further on in this chapter. Other species cooperate, usually with a small number of individuals, mostly
close kin. As the size of potential cooperators grows, and genetic relatedness among individuals within
the group shrinks ⎯⎯ adding more unfamiliar strangers to the mix ⎯⎯ the potential risks of cooperating
with a cheater increases. Religion, and its core features, evolved to diminish this risk and increase the
odds of developing a society of stable cooperators. Viewed from this perspective, religion is an adaptation
⎯⎯ in the evolved for sense.
For those scholars who favor the idea of religion as adaptation, supporting evidence comes from
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 24
analyses of historical data together with experiments. Religious groups show higher levels of
cooperation, often over longer periods of time, than many other organized, but non-religious groups.
Religious groups also tend to last longer as groups than non-religious organizations or institutions.
Cooperation among religious groups is often facilitated by punishment or the implication of punishment
from a deity. In a study of 186 societies by the biologist Dominic Johnson, analyses showed that those
who believed in a strong moralizing god, capable of doling out punishment, engaged in higher levels of
cooperation, including paying taxes, complying with norms, and repaying loans. These observations are
complimented by experiments showing that people are more generous about giving away their money in a
bargaining game, and less likely to cheat, when they think about words associated with religion — divine,
God, spirit, sacred, prophet — than when they think about neutral words. For example, in the dictator
game, involving two anonymous players, one decides how much of a pot of money to give to the other.
The recipient has no say, and is thus stuck with whatever the donor offers. In general, donors give either
nothing or about half. When primed to think about religion, donors are more likely to give than keep the
entire pot, and give more as well.
The implication of these results is that the religiously-minded feel that they are being watched.
Cueing up words that are indicative of their religious beliefs, heightens their vigilance and their moral
obligations. Religion fuels altruism and fends off the temptation to cheat.
All of the observations and experiments discussed above are fascinating and relevant to
understanding the role of religion in past and present societies. But this evidence is irrelevant for
understanding the evolutionary origins of religion. It is irrelevant because it can’t determine whether
religion originally evolved to solve the problem of large scale cooperation among strangers or whether it
evolved for other reasons but was then used in the context of cooperation. This alternative explanation
sees religion as an exaptation. No one doubts that religion provides social cohesion. No one doubts that
religion also sends a buzzing reminder to the brain’s moral conscience center. But from a description of
what it does today, or even in the distant past, we can’t conclude that it evolved for this purpose. That
religious organizations show higher levels of cooperation than non-religious groups doesn’t mean they
evolved for cooperation. We also can’t conclude that religion’s effectiveness as social glue relies on
uniquely religious psychological thoughts and emotions. Though the creation of and belief in
supernatural powers may be unique to religion, other foundational beliefs and emotions are shared across
different domains of knowledge: young children attribute intentions, beliefs and desires to unseen causes,
including the movement of clouds and leaves; non-religious moral systems use punishment to embarrass,
recruit regret, and fuel shame; like many religions, non-religious institutions also attempt to reprogram the
thoughts and beliefs of its members ⎯⎯ think of all the global rebel operatives that brainwash innocent
children into becoming child soldiers. Religion helps itself to non-religious psychology. The utility of
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 25
religion looks like a case of exaptation ⎯⎯ an expression of human thoughts and emotions that originally
evolved to solve problems other than cooperation, but once in place were swiftly adopted for solving
problems of cooperation.
Further evidence in support of religion as exaptation comes from a follow-up to the dictator game
experiment discussed above. If you swap religious words for non-religious but moral words such as civic,
duty, jury, court and police, you get the same results: people give more money when thinking about these
morally-pregnant, but non-religious words. It is also the case that if you paste up a photograph of eyes
next to a money box for coffee, people give more than with a photograph of flowers. What these two
studies show is that words and images that make us think about others, especially the possibility that
others are watching, turns us into bigger spenders. These psychological transformations are not, however,
specific to religion. Some may think that God is watching, but they and others may also think of a whitebearded,
gavel-wielding, atheistic judge.
We learn three important lessons from the study of tameness and religion, lessons that will propel
our discussion of evil. First, distinguish what something evolved for from what it is used for. Second,
dissect complicated traits down into their component parts as the parts, together with their interdependence,
may have different evolutionary histories. Third, the combination of independently evolved
capacities can lead to novel adaptations and possibilities. Some combinations lead to altruistic and
humane compassion toward those we don’t know. Others lead to virulent hatred and annihilation of those
we do know. The brain’s promiscuity is a driving engine for both the good, the bad, and the ugly.
From the shackles of monogamy to the freedom of promiscuity
Many years ago, some American friends of mine were married in a small village in Tanzania. After the
wedding, they went to a local official who was responsible for providing a marriage certificate. On the
certificate were three choices, indicative of the type of marriage: Monogamous, Polygynous, and
Potentially Polygynous. My friends chuckled, but aimed their pen with confidence at Monogamous.
Before they could ink the certificate, however, several Tanzanian men shouted out “NO! At least
Potentially Polygynous. Give yourself the option.” Right, the option. The freedom to explore.
Among social animals, only a few species pair bond for life, or at least a very long time. This fact
is equally true of the social mammals: less than 5% of the 4000 or so species are strictly monogamous.
For these rare species, most of their efforts to think, plan, and feel are dedicated to their partner; what’s
left over goes into finding food and avoiding becoming dinner. Life is much more complicated for the rest
of the social animals. Their social and sexual relationships are more promiscuous, less stable and less
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 26
predictable. This unpredictability is partially responsible for changes in the brain. Promiscuous mating
systems demand more flexibility, creativity and out of the box thinking.
The anthropologist Steve Gaulin explored the idea that a species’ mating system is directly
related to its capacity to think. Gaulin started by looking at two closely related species of voles, one
monogamous and the other polygynous. In the polygynous vole, males typically mate with multiple
females. To achieve this kind of mating success, males have large territories that encompass many
smaller female territories. In the monogamous species, the male and female share the same territory, with
mating restricted to the couple. These differences in mating system and space usage have two direct
consequences: relative to the monogamous male vole, the polygynous male vole must travel much further
in a day than the females and must recall where the female territories are located. For a polygynous male
vole, mating success depends on long day trips, visiting each of the female territories. For the
monogamous male vole, there are no physical or memory challenges as the female is virtually always
nearby. Given the costs to a polygynous male vole of forgetting where the females live, there should be
strong selection on the memory system. Gaulin confirmed this prediction by showing that polygynous
male voles outcompete females of their species in a maze running competition, and also have larger
memory systems than females. In the monogamous vole, there are no sex differences in maze running or
memory.
Gaulin’s work provides a gorgeous example of how evolutionary pressures can act on the brain to
create differences in psychological capacity. Other examples abound, including evidence that fruit eaters
have larger brains than leaf eaters, primates living in large social groups have larger frontal lobes than
those living in smaller groups, and bats living in open habitats have smaller brains than those living in
complex closed habitats. In each case, a particular ecological or social pressure ⎯⎯ finding ripe fruit,
updating the status of numerous social relationships, avoiding obstacles while in flight ⎯⎯ sculpts
differences in brain anatomy and function. Some of these pressures favor extreme specialization and
myopia, whereas others favor a broader vision. Relative to every healthy member of our species, all other
animals have tunnel vision. When our ancestors began to migrate out of Africa, the diversity of
environments and social opportunities favored generalists with a broad and flexible vision.
To appreciate the significance of the human revolution in brain engineering, consider three cases
of myopic, but highly adaptive intelligence in other animals, cases that lack the signature of intellectual
promiscuity; these cases are of particular interest because they represent the kinds of examples that
caused Darwin to doubt the beneficence of God, to reflect upon the cruelty of nature, and to ponder the
problem of evil:
• The wasp Ampulex compressa tackles a specific species of cockroach, inserts a
first stinger into its body to cause leg paralysis and eliminate fighting, then a second
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 27
stinger into the brain that causes intense auto-grooming followed by three weeks of
lethargy. During this down time, the cockroach turns into a living meal for the wasp’s
larvae.
•A Brazilian parasitoid wasp of the family Braconidae, lays its eggs inside a
particular species of caterpillar, and once the larvae are fully developed, they hatch out of
the caterpillar. Though it is strange enough for caterpillars to function like incubators,
these innocent larvae were anything but innocent while developing inside the caterpillar.
Once the larvae hatch, they are treated to an unprecedented level of care from the
caterpillar who, Gandhi-like, foregoes all eating and moving to protect its adopted young,
including violent head-swings against any intruder. The wasp has effectively brainwashed
the caterpillar, hijacking its evolved instincts to care for its own young.
•A solitary wasp in the genus Sceliphron selectively feeds on the dangerous and
much larger black widow spider, using two tricks: it secretes a substance that is like
Teflon, allowing it to move into a spider’s web without getting stuck; next, it flails
around in the web to attract the spider, and once the spider is positioned above in kill
mode, the wasp launches its stinger, piercing the spider right through the brain. End of
black widow. If the wasp makes the slightest mistake, end of wasp.
The capacity that has evolved in these wasps is myopically focused on one problem, and one problem
alone. Despite the mind control and deception that is part of their evolved competence, they don’t deploy
these skills in any other context. This highly adaptive and monogamous pattern of thinking runs
throughout the animal kingdom and across different contexts, including male cleaner fish that attack
female cleaner fish who violate the rules of mucus-eating from their clients, but do not deploy such
draconian measures in other situations; birds that feign injury to deter predators from their nest, but
deceive in no other context; cheetah mothers who demonstrate to their cubs how to bring down prey, but
never provide pedagogical instructions in other relevant domains of development; and monkeys that
understand how to use tools generously provided by humans but never create any of their own.
Like other animals, we too are equipped with adaptive capacities that evolved to solve particular
problems. Unlike other animals, however, these same adaptive specializations are readily deployed to
solve novel problems, often by combining capacities. Like wasps, we deceive, manipulate and parasitize
others, often cruelly. But unlike wasps, we don’t use these abilities with one type of victim in one context.
As long as the opportunity for personal gain is high relative to the potential cost, we are more than willing
to deceive, manipulate, and parasitize lovers, competitors and family members. When we attack rule
violators, not only do we do so in the context of cheaters who eat but don’t pay, but also deadbeat dads
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 28
who fail to care for their young, cads who have extramarital affairs, and trigger-happy murderers who
take the lives of innocent people. What changes in the brain enabled us, but no other species, to engage in
promiscuous thinking?
To understand what changed in the brain, it is useful to paint a few broad-stroke comparisons, and
then narrow in on the details. We know, for example, that brain size changed dramatically over the
course of our evolutionary history, ultimately reaching three times the size of a chimpanzee’s brain with
the appearance of the first modern humans some 100-200,000 years ago. From the archaeological
evidence, we can infer that some aspect of the internal workings of the brain ⎯⎯ not simply size ⎯⎯ must
have changed at about the same time in order to explain the appearance of a new material culture of tools
with multiple parts and functions, musical instruments, symbolically decorated burial grounds, and cave
paintings. Before this period, the material culture of our ancestors was rather uncreative, with simple tools
and no symbolism. The new material culture was heralded by a mind unlike any other animal. No other
animal spontaneously creates symbols, though chimpanzees and bonobos can be trained to acquire those
we invent and attempt to pass on. No other animal creates musical instruments or even uses their own
voice for pure pleasure. No other animal buries its dead, no less memorializes them with decorations; ants
drag dead members out of their colony area and deposit them in a heap, though this is driven by hygiene
as opposed to ceremonial remembrance and respect. Only a species with the capacity to combine and
recombine different evolved specializations of the brain could create these archaeological remains. This
period in our evolutionary history marks the birth of our promiscuous brain. The brain sciences have
helped us see the fine details of this new species of mind.
The comparative anatomists Ralph Holloway, James Rilling, and Kristina Aldridge have
analyzed brain scans and skull casts of humans and all of the apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas,
orangutans, and gibbons. This sample represents approximately 15 million years of evolution, and
includes considerable diversity in mating systems, dietary preferences, use of tools, group size, life span,
locomotion style, communication system, aggressiveness, and capacity for cooperation. Thus, gibbons are
monogamously pair bonded, live in small family groups in the upper canopies, swinging and singing to
defend their territories, never use or create tools, are omnivorous, restrict cooperation to within the
family group, and show little aggression. Gorillas are folivores or leaf eaters, live in harem societies,
knuckle walk on the ground, rarely use or make tools in the wild, show aggression primarily between
harems, communicate with a diversity of sounds, and show limited cooperation even under captive
conditions. Chimpanzees are promiscuous, omnivores who hunt for meat on the ground and in the tree
tops, create a diversity of tools that are culturally distinctive between regions, communicate with a
diversity of sounds, are lethal killers when they confront individuals from a neighboring community, and
are cooperative especially in competitive situations. Despite this diversity, nonhuman ape brains are much
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 29
more similar to each other than any one is to a human brain. What changed since we split off from our ape
cousins is both the overall geometry of the brain in terms of the relative size of different components, as
well as the connections both within and between these components. Some of the most spectacular
changes evolved within the frontal and temporal lobes, as well as their connections to other areas of the
brain involved in the control of emotion and stress. These circuits play a critical role in decision making,
self control, short-term memory, social relationships, tool use and language.
For detail, and further evidence of the importance of connectivity in promiscuous thinking, we
turn to brain imaging studies of healthy adults, developing children, and patient populations that lack the
signature of promiscuity. Consider tool use. Though a wide variety of nonhuman animals use tools, only
humans create tools that combine different materials, have multiple functioning parts, can be used for
functions other than the one originally designed, and function in the context of survival, reproduction, and
leisure. These properties are the signature of a promiscuous brain. When we look at the material culture of
the most sophisticated animal tool user ⎯⎯ the chimpanzee ⎯⎯ we see tools that use a single material, have
only a single functional part, are only designed for one function, and the function set is strictly limited to
survival or reproduction. Something as simple as a pencil, beyond the chimpanzees’ wildest imagination,
consists of multiple materials (rubber, wood, lead, metal), was designed for writing but can be used for
poking or keeping hair up in a bun, and has two functional parts (lead for writing, rubber for erasing).
When you put a human subject in a brain scanner and record activity during observations of tool use,
what you see is an orchestrated coordination between different and connected brain regions. There is
activity in regions carrying out spatial analyses, motor behavior, goal directed assessments, and object
recognition, and much of this activity is fed forward to the frontal areas for storage in working memory as
well as judgment and evaluation. A healthy adult brain is a heavily connected brain. Promiscuity results
from a network of interconnected brain regions.
Even resting brains show signs of promiscuity. When you lie down in bed and close your eyes,
but before you drift off to sleep, your brain ⎯⎯ assuming you are an adult and healthy ⎯⎯ shows activity in
a family of inter-connected brain regions called the default network. This is your brain at rest, but it is
anything but at rest. Some of the most active areas involve those that are engaged when we evaluate
social relationships, consider what others believe and desire, who they are, and how we might interact in
the future. This same default network looks very different in children, as well as in the elderly: it is much
less connected. Growing up is connecting up. Growing old is disconnecting. We gain promiscuous
thinking as we mature and lose it as we age.
If connection is key, then disorders of the mind or physical insult should result in predictable loss
of promiscuity. A brain imaging study of individuals with autism is revealing. Individuals with autism
fall along a spectrum, from low to high functioning. Though this spectrum captures important
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 30
differences, all inflicted with this developmental disorder have difficulty understanding the beliefs,
intentions and emotions of others, and often become hyper-aroused when seeing, hearing, or touching
rather unremarkable objects or events. All of these capacities require a system that can integrate multiple
sources of information. During brain scanning, individuals with autism show a striking reduction in
activity in an area called the insula and its connection to both the somatosensory cortex and amygdala.
The insula is an area of the brain that is like a traffic cop, responsible for coordinating the flow of
information in the brain, both where it is coming from and where it should go. The somatosensory cortex
handles our body’s response to the world, including its state of arousal. The amygdala plays a key role in
emotional processing, and more generally, in generating positive or negative assessments about the value
of an experience. With the traffic cop asleep, and the body’s arousal and emotional hubs dormant, it is no
wonder that those with autism lack empathy, can’t understand what it means for someone to be in love,
are befuddled by deception, and find the bombardment from our media-intense world truly
overwhelming. The lack of connectivity among those with autism is proof that connectivity is necessary
for promiscuous thinking.
Once we evolved our massively connected, promiscuous brain, tool use, communication,
mathematics, music, and morality were transformed. No longer were we constrained to think within the
confines of the evolved context. We could take aspects of an ancient psychology that evolved for one
problem and use it for new purposes, some beneficial to us individually and as members of a group, and
some costly to our own and others’ survival.
Consider our capacity to defend members within a group against attack from individuals outside
the group. Many, perhaps even the majority of religious groups have carried out this mission, some with
violence such as the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland, and some with tranquility such as the
Tibetan’s plea for peace amidst a powerful Chinese oppressor. The process starts, however, with an
ancient system that we share with all socially living animals. To survive and reproduce, individuals
cooperate with members of their own group and defend their resources against members of neighboring
groups. All animals, humans included, recognize group members by distinctive markings or recalling
features associated with specific individuals. We transformed this evolutionarily ancient capacity into a
distinctively human one by combining it with our systems of language, morality, and beliefs. This
combination allows us to use symbols to demarcate those within our group from those outside, to tie these
symbols to distinctive beliefs, values, and emotions, and to use these different psychological systems to
caricature the other as buffoon, vermin, parasite, or inanimate cargo. This combinatorial process allows
us to cleanse the in-group by annihilating the out-group. It allows us to increase cooperation within a
group while ramping up the defenses to take out enemies living outside the group. This strategy is
simple and effective. First, convince one group of people that another group has a set of undesirable traits,
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 31
features that will undermine the success of the in-group. This has the effect of tightening the bonds
within the group. Next, convince the in-group that those undesirable qualities make the others less-thanhuman
and barely nonhuman. Next, make sure that the nonhuman mascot for the out-group is vile,
abhorrent, and disgusting. This ingredient is critical as it guarantees that each member of the in-group will
feel a surge of disgust every time it sees or hears of the out-group. Once disgust is in motion, there is
only one additional step: either destroy or purge the other of its vile qualities. Destruction is not only
permissible, but morally obligatory, carried out guilt-free because the mind has taken the other out of the
moral domain and into the domain of property ⎯⎯ either dispensable, controllable or transformable.
Taking out the other is rewarding. Harm feels good.
Our uniquely promiscuous minds invented dehumanization, using a recipe of adaptive ingredients
⎯⎯ defense against an enemy, disgust as a response to noxious and unhealthy substances, and creative
language use. This is a dangerous idea, one I develop in chapter 3. It is one of many capacities that
enabled us to uniquely imagine new ways of inflicting excessive harm on others. It is a capacity that,
nonetheless, has a deep evolutionary history.
HARMING OTHERS, version 1.0: non-lethal behavioral routines
All animals are motivated to secure resources that will enable them to survive and reproduce. At the most
basic and universal level, this is what life is all about. Gaining access to resources enables individuals to
accrue more resources, live longer, and produce more offspring. The path to acquiring resources is
complicated by two facts of life that were central to Darwin’s insights into the process of evolution:
resources are limited and individuals must compete with others from the same and different species for
these resources. Competition is the breeding ground for aggression ⎯⎯ the most basic means of harming
others. Aggression is a natural outcome of living in a social world where supper, sex, and space never
come prepared on a silver platter. Here I explore the core properties of non-lethal aggression, a manner of
harming others that is part of every animals’ behavioral repertoire. This discussion sets the stage for
understanding how evolution’s R&D operation enabled a transformation of the non-lethal form of
aggression into a lethal form, and ultimately, into an excessively lethal form that is the trademark of
human evil. It also shows how the social norms guiding animal aggression evolved into moral norms, and
thus, why we perceive some forms of aggression as deeply wrong, unethical and grotesque.
Consider life on Earth before human existence, say 10 million years ago. Our closest living
relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos are living in the forests of Africa, and so too are dozens of other
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 32
primates, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects. And of course, there are animals
populating every other continent and the seas that surround them. Among the social animals ⎯⎯ those
living in groups ⎯⎯ the common form of aggression is one-on-one, and the context is typically
competition over food, a place to rest, or access to a mate. Sometimes the aggression is initiated as an
attack and sometimes it is in self-defense. Sometimes it is highly ritualized and planned, and sometimes it
is a reactive free-for-all. Sometimes it occurs within the group and sometimes between. Severe injuries
arise, but deaths are rare. The aim is to resolve a competitive dispute by means of non-lethal aggression,
and if possible, non-physical contact. If someone dies it is because an injury leaves them incapacitated or
vulnerable to disease. It is not because their opponent aimed to kill. The ubiquity of non-lethal aggression
points to a suite of common biological ingredients, a core set of neurobiological, hormonal and
psychological adaptations that constrain how animals fight.
It all starts with one individual perceiving a valuable resource that is within reaching distance of a
competitor. What launches a first move and subsequently guides the process to its completion with a
winner and a loser? In some species there are rules of thumb that deflate any aggressive instincts before
they are launched, even though there are clear competitive interests. For example, in territorial lizards
and birds, if an emigrating individual lands in an area and sees or hears another individual vigorously
displaying ⎯⎯ push-ups with colorfully flashing neck sacs in lizards, vocal arias in birds ⎯⎯ they move on.
The rule: territory owners win, no questions asked. Another rule of thumb arises in species organized
around either permanent or breeding-only harems: one male and many females. Two classic cases are the
well-studied hamadryas baboons of Ethiopia and the elephant seals of California. In both species, males
are much larger than females, with elephant seals providing an extreme case ⎯⎯ the harem master can be
ten times bigger than the females he mates with. In hamadryas, no one challenges the male over access to
the females in his harem. Competition arises in acquiring females into a harem, a process that starts early,
with individual males recruiting juvenile females. In elephant seals, either one or a few males completely
monopolize the mating among the often hundred or more females within the harem. These males rule. As
evidenced by genetic fingerprinting, virtually all of the offspring are sired by 1-3 males. No mating
competition. Competition arises when the young turks try to wear down the harem master through
repeated challenges over the season. Eventually, often over the course of several mating seasons, the
harem master loses a fight and hangs up his gloves.
Dominance hierarchies provide another set of rules or norms that guide competition, and thus
aggression. In general, irrespective of the species, high ranking animals outcompete low ranking animals
for access to resources. If the spread between two individuals within the hierarchy is large, the
subordinate acts like a migrating lizard or bird landing in a resident’s territory: no contest, no competition,
no fighting. If the spread is less, say two individuals who hold adjacent positions within the hierarchy,
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 33
then other factors enter into the calculation. This is where things get interesting as these other factors
determine the start and end of a contest.
Insights into the dynamics of aggressive competition emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s
due to two fundamental developments within evolutionary biology. The first involved a marriage
between economic game theory and evolutionary biology. This marriage was set up by the British
evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith who recognized that for any competitive interaction, there are
different strategies, each with different payoffs. Some strategies are more costly, but return greater
benefits. Others are more conservative and less costly, but return smaller benefits. How well any given
strategy does depends on its frequency in the population, and thus, on whether the particular strategy is
dominant or rare. For example, consider a baboon troop with 20 adult males. Imagine that one of the
males decides to bare his canines, stand up on his two hind legs, and charge whenever anyone comes near
him and he is eating. This male is displaying his intent to attack at the slightest provocation. One could
imagine that this would be very effective, especially if he is the only one displaying in this way. But if
this display pattern spreads, and all 19 other males do the same thing, then this strategy fails as it no
longer distinguishes among the 20 males in the troop. What evolutionary game theory tells us is that the
effectiveness of a strategy depends on how common it is within the population. Power comes, in part,
from being not too common or predictable.
The second development involved signaling theory, and a challenge to the traditional approach
that considered animal signals as truthful messengers of information. On the traditional view, when a
monkey bares his canines, he is signaling his motivation to attack. When a dog puts his tail between his
legs, he is signaling his submissive status. When a bird gives an alarm call, she is telling others that a
predator is nearby. When a human smiles, he is conveying his desire for friendship. The new signaling
theory presented a challenge to this honest view of communication. Why, for example, wouldn’t
individuals lie, deceiving others into believing that they were really tough, meek, in danger, or friendly,
only to take advantage of the situation and gain added resources. Why, for example, wouldn’t a baboon
who was actually afraid, put on a tough-guy show and scare off his opponents? Why wouldn’t a dog who
was actually tough, send a submissive signal at the start of the interaction, cause his opponent to lower his
guard, and then attack? Why wouldn’t a bird send an alarm in the absence of danger, knowing that others
will run for cover and leave all the food behind ⎯⎯ no competition? Why wouldn’t a human who actually
wanted to lure in an innocent victim for robbery send a seductive smile? This line of questioning,
developed by the British evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and John Krebs, led to a number of
studies showing that animals are engaged in a much more complicated and dynamic dance when they
compete. Static properties of the animal ⎯⎯ its height, weight, tail length, antler size ⎯⎯ indicate its raw,
unfakeable ability to fight or what biologists call Resource Holding Potential or RHP. A deer with a large
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 34
set of antlers has paid the costs of growth, and is thus, a serious opponent with considerable strength. A
tall, heavy, long-tusked elephant bull has spent the time and energy to bulk up, and can throw this weight
around in a fight. Added on to an animal’s RHP are dynamic properties, features that require energetic
investment in the moment such as the loudness or duration of a vocalization, or the height of a jump
display. These dynamic properties form the foundation of competitive interactions, and the raw material
for assessments. When a resource is up for grabs, and no simple rule of thumb or RHP factor trumps,
animals assess each others’ displays, working out whether to flee or escalate. What, if anything in a
display, reflects the signaler’s true capacity and motivation?
The Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi provided a simple, yet far-reaching explanation
of honest signaling. Honesty, in the animal world, is simply about prediction. When a kob standing on his
territorial mound charges toward another, to what extent does this display predict that he will continue the
attack if the opponent doesn’t flee? Is he all smoke or does the display accurately predict the followthrough?
When a mantis shrimp uses his powerful claw to thump the sand at an intruder, will he go
further, thumping the intruder who continues to advance? Zahavi’s solution was based in economics:
signals are honest if and only if they are costly to produce, where cost is relative to current condition or
health. If every kob can charge even if they are blowing smoke, the charge display carries no weight. It is
pure puffery and dishonest. If every mantis shrimp can thump with its appendage, and does so regardless
of its current power, then sand thumping loses value. For a charging display or sand thumping to carry
value, they have to be costly to produce and only those in good enough condition should be able to
tolerate the costs. Numerous studies support Zahavi’s insight, including work on insects, crabs, birds, and
gazelles, as well as hunter-gatherers and religious institutions. Hunter-gatherers do it by showing off and
sharing their large prey capture, whereas religions do it by showing their commitment to long and
involved ritual displays.
The vast majority of animal competition is settled by means of non-lethal aggression. Animals
adopt different strategies, use rules of thumb, and engage in assessment in order to minimize the costs of
battle. This is version 1.0 of HARMING OTHERS. This version operates within every animal, humans
included. Over time, some animals evolved hormonal and neural upgrades that changed how individuals
experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, as well as changes in their willingness to take
risks. These upgrades inched animals closer to lethal aggression, pushed some right into it, and others
over the top.
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 35
HARMING OTHERS, version 1.1: microcontrollers
In any competitive situation, whether it is animals working out a strategy for maximizing the odds of
obtaining food or humans working out a strategy for maximizing the odds of check mating an opponent’s
king, someone will walk away as the winner and someone as the loser. Winning feels good and losing
feels bad. Winning fuels confidence, losing lowers self-esteem. Depending on the opponent, including
what they look like and whether they are familiar or unfamiliar, it is possible to gauge the likelihood of
winning or losing in advance. Depending on the individual’s prior history of wins and losses, and details
of his or her personality, some individuals will embrace the challenge of a high risk-high payoff strategy
whereas others will adopt a low-risk low payoff strategy. Winning, losing, and taking risks are all
mediated by differences in hormone levels, neurochemicals, and patterns of brain activation. Some of
these differences are set by the individual’s biology, some change over the course of a year, some within a
day, and some within the period of a brief glance that allows for an opponent to assess the competition.
These physiological processes are the microcontrollers that regulate an individual’s motivation to fight or
flee, as well as the sense of reward and loss that accompanies winning and losing. These microcontrollers
adaptively regulate the capacity to harm, at least until they malfunction. Malfunctions, whatever their
cause, can convert healthy, defensive, competitive, and justifiable harms into over the top excessive and
unethical harms.
One of the primary microcontrollers is the hormone testosterone. Though it is commonly assumed
that testosterone is a male hormone, it is also present in females, though at lower concentrations.
Testosterone plays an essential role in both sexual and aggressive behavior in all social animals.
Testosterone surges when males defend their territories, and also, when they recruit sexually available
females. Stronger surges occur when individuals are challenged by competitors who want their territory,
food, mates, or position within a hierarchy. What this shows is that testosterone motivates animals within
the arena of competition.
Testosterone also surges again after an individual wins a fight, and drops following a loss. This is
highly adaptive as it motivates winners to keep defending their resources, and motivates losers to give up
and minimize future costs. Across a wide variety of species, humans included, winners are two times
more likely to win the next fight whereas losers are five times less likely to win the next fight. These
winner-loser effects are mediated by testosterone. In our own species, among male and female athletes,
in sports including soccer, tennis and judo, winners show higher testosterone levels than losers. This
effect even holds in non-physical competition, such as chess and stock trading. In a study of day traders
on the London Stock Exchange, those making the highest profits had the highest levels of testosterone.
Even those who are simply witnesses to a winning competition show increases in testosterone, including
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 36
cichlid fish spectators observing a winning fight, and soccer spectators seeing their team win the World
Cup.
What many volumes of experiments reveal is that testosterone plays a fundamental role in social
behavior across the animal kingdom, motivating individuals to defend their resources, acquire additional
resources when possible, develop confidence following victory, and gracefully walk away following
defeat. Testosterone influences behavior, and behavior influences testosterone. If an individual
experiences a challenge, this causes an increase in testosterone. The increase in testosterone heightens
confidence and risk-taking to defend the resources. Heightened confidence and risk-taking are often
associated with winning fights. Winning fights increases testosterone, bringing us full circle to the
challenges of social living.
Testosterone is joined by several other microcontrollers, including at least one additional
hormone ⎯⎯ cortisol ⎯⎯ two neurochemicals ⎯⎯ serotonin and dopamine ⎯⎯ and several brain areas that are
affected by these hormones and neurochemicals. Our understanding of this assemblage, beautifully
synthesized by the psychologist Jack van Honk, accounts for both our adaptive and sometimes highly
maladaptive capacity to harm others.
Cortisol mediates the stress response in fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including all ages of
human mammals. When fear kicks in due to aggressive challenges from a dominant individual or from
the appearance of a predator, cortisol rises. When individuals confront uncertainty, cortisol rises. When
cortisol levels are high, individuals are more sensitive to punishment and more likely to avoid social
interactions. Flipping the polarity around, when cortisol levels are low, individuals are more aggressive,
more reward focused, and less sensitive to punishment. Testosterone and cortisol therefore play within
the bodies of animals like two children sitting on opposite ends of a see-saw. When testosterone is up and
cortisol is down, individuals are primed to harm others and take risks. When testosterone is down and
cortisol is up, individuals are risk averse, less likely to harm and more likely to engage in friendly social
behavior.
Serotonin, as noted earlier in the discussion of domestication, is primarily involved in selfcontrol.
High serotonin levels are associated with behavioral inhibition, whereas low serotonin levels are
associated with disinhibition or impulsivity, as well as heightened aggression. Dopamine is linked to the
experience of reward, both in terms of predicting when it will occur and in motivating behavior that
maximizes the odds of obtaining the goods. When animals reach their goals or expect to obtain them,
including food, mating, or winning a fight, the brain delivers a surge of dopamine. In humans, taking a
drug that increases the amount of dopamine, causes people to believe that they will feel more elated about
an event in the future.
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 37
Testosterone modulates these brain chemicals, suppressing serotonin in the service of heightening
aggression, and ramping up dopamine to add to the already reinforcing properties of testosterone. But
like dopamine, testosterone is also directly linked to the reward system. Mice will work a response lever
to deliver testosterone, and humans become addicted to it. If you inject testosterone into a mouse while it
is moving about, the location associated with the injection becomes tagged as a favorite spot in the
landscape, a place to revisit. Drug abusers and gamblers, two personality profiles associated with
heightened experience of reward and poor self-control, have elevated levels of testosterone and dopamine.
Twirling inside the brains and bodies of all social animals is a physiological ballet that controls
the capacity to harm others. This choreography links harming others with the experience of reward. In
some animals, the link between harm and reward was upgraded to a capacity for lethal aggression.
HARMING OTHERS, version 1.5: upgrade to lethal aggression
All social animals have evolved the capacity for aggression, using it to fight members of their own
species for food, land, and sex. For virtually all animals, winning a fight means chasing away or injuring
a competitor, but not killing them. There are, however, three situations in which animals kill, two are
broadly distributed across the animal kingdom and one is extremely rare. In virtually every taxonomic
group of animals ⎯⎯ insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals ⎯⎯ there are predators and
prey. Predators are not merely aggressive, but designed to kill prey species for the purpose of survival.
Also common is infanticide, situations in which adults kill infants. Infanticide is often committed by
males who have recently entered a group with infants sired by other males. By killing these infants, not
only does the newcomer obliterate the competition’s fitness, but he effectively reboots the female’s sexual
receptivity. Both predation and infanticide entail significant asymmetries in size or weaponry between
attacker and victim, making the kill relatively cost-free. Rare in the animal kingdom are cases where
attacker and victim are from the same species, both adults, and thus, comparable in size and weaponry.
This kind of killing ⎯⎯ call it adulticide ⎯⎯ only occurs in a small number of species, but the attacks are
sufficiently frequent to count as part of the repertoire: ants, lions, wolves, chimpanzees and humans. The
rarity of adulticide raises important questions about the evolutionary pressures that favored this upgrade
to harming others, as well as the mechanisms that evolved to make it possible.
Battles among ant colonies are notorious for their organized attacks, designed to kill the enemy
and minimize costs. Watching ant colonies battle it out piques the imagination, recalling the classic face
offs between British and French brigades, each side lined up in strategic formation, divided into ranks, set
up to protect the land and royalty. In his book Life in the Woods, the American writer and nature lover
Henry David Thoreau, writes that the ant battles were “deadly combat … without any noise… I never
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 38
learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war: but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had
had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human
battle before my door.” What is distinctive about ant battles and the deaths that ensue is that they are
coordinated, with success driven by group size. As the biologist Eldridge Adams has demonstrated,
bigger groups are more likely to win, more likely to kill a higher number of their smaller opponents, and
less likely to incur any fatalities. Despite the similarities between ant and human battles, two differences
undermine the usefulness of this analogy for understanding the evolution of lethal aggression in humans:
ants are only a very distant evolutionary cousin, subject to extremely different pressures of social life, and
their cooperative efforts are largely among individuals who are virtual genetic clones. When humans go to
battle, cooperation is largely among unrelated individuals who are complete strangers. Of the small
sample of species committing adulticide, chimpanzees are our best bet as they are closer evolutionary
cousins and they join forces with kin and non-kin.
To get a sense of lethal aggression in chimpanzees, consider the following description by the
anthropologist David Watts and his colleagues concerning an attack by males of the Ngogo community of
Uganda (emphasized words are mine):
[Field Assistant] G. Mbabazi found 12 adult and three adolescent males, 10 of which had participated in
the boundary patrol 2 days before … in the eastern part of the Ngogo chimpanzees’ territory. They
started another boundary patrol by quickly and quietly moving south and then east. At 0830 hr, they
moved east through a field of elephant grass (Pennisetum purpureum), then reentered the forest and went
toward the spot where BT, LO, and MO [three adult male chimpanzees] had been displaying 1 day
before and the area where Ngogo males had patrolled the day before that. As they reentered the forest,
the Ngogo chimpanzees met chimpanzees from another community. The neighboring chimpanzees were
feeding quietly on Pseudospondias microcarpa fruit in the same tree under which BT, LO, and MO had
displayed. G. Mbabazi could not ascertain the precise number of chimpanzees from the neighboring
group, but he saw at least two females with infants, one juvenile, and one adult male that immediately
fled northeast with the Ngogo chimpanzees in pursuit. The Ngogo chimpanzees caught up to the strange
adult male after chasing him for about 100 m and surrounded him. Adult Ngogo male EL began to
pummel the intruder, and adults BF, BRU, LO, and MO quickly joined him. The strange male tried to
escape down a small hill but could not elude these five Ngogo males and others that joined them. The
Ngogo males, led by EL, continued to beat, bite, and kick him for 20 min, and dragged him farther
down this hill into a small stream valley about 50 m away from the spot of his initial capture, where he
died during or shortly after the attack. All of the Ngogo males remained in the area after the stranger
was killed. Several circled his body and some sniffed it, while others sat nearby. …Careful inspection
showed that the victim suffered wounds across his entire body … including a deep gash to the bone on
the left humerus and a deep puncture on the left side of the thorax near the heart. The only missing
body part was the victim’s testes, which were recovered 50 m away, near where he was initially captured
(2006, p.g., 166).
Watts’ description captures several important features of adulticide in chimpanzees ⎯⎯ both at the
same field site and others throughout Africa ⎯⎯ and in other species. The lethal attacks are explicitly
proactive and planned. This is important because many cases of non-lethal aggression are reactive and
impulsive, and studies of human and nonhuman aggression reveal different brain mechanisms underlying
these two forms of violence. When chimpanzees attack, they use stealth to sneak up on the victim, and
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 39
then relentlessly hunt them down. When they catch the victim, the attack is brutal, focused on body parts
that are necessary for moving, communicating and reproducing. The attackers commonly have a
numerical advantage over the victims, a ratio of at least three to one. This power imbalance reduces the
costs of the attack by making it almost impossible for the victim to retaliate. Proof of this cost-benefit
analysis comes from the fact that the attacking party rarely incurs injuries, whereas the victims rarely
escape alive. The benefit of these attacks is that the attacking community gains access to additional
resources by weakening the competitive strength of their neighbors. In a well documented case from Jane
Goodall’s site in Gombe, Tanzania, one chimpanzee community literally eliminated their competitors in
the neighboring community, absorbing the remaining individuals and land. Though such attacks are
certainly not a daily affair, they occur with sufficient frequency and benefits to create a selective
advantage for the winners.
The suite of behaviors that accompany coalitionary killing in chimpanzees has led several
scientists, most notably Wrangham, to argue that this form of lethal aggression in chimpanzees is an
adaptation, with deep parallels to human warfare. On this view, we inherited the upgrade to version 1.5
lethal aggression.
The claim that our capacity for killing, especially in war, is an evolved adaptation, is anathema to
many, scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The visceral antagonism is triggered by the belief
that biological explanations imply inevitability, and provide an excuse for the atrocities we create. For
these scholars, war, and more generally, the high levels of killing observed among human populations, are
recent, cultural concoctions, born out of human intelligence, the invention of projectile weapons, and high
population density, to name a few. From this perspective, biology plays no meaningful role in our
understanding of human violence. From this perspective, killing in chimpanzees looks nothing like killing
in humans. This attitude echoes the famous 1986 Seville Statement on violence in which a group of
distinguished scientists, including the ethologist Robert Hinde, the geneticist John Paul Scott, and the
biological anthropologist Richard Leakey, sidelined biology with the following five statements:
1. "It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make
war from our animal ancestors."
2. "It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behaviour is
genetically programmed into our human nature."
3. "It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there
has been a selection for aggressive behaviour more than for other kinds of
behaviour."
4. "It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a 'violent brain'."
5. "It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by 'instinct' or any single
motivation."
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 40
These claims led to the rather dreamy-eyed utopian conclusion that “Just as 'wars begin in the
minds of men', peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of
inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.” In essence, understanding our biology will not
contribute to understanding violence and war because we invented war as well as peace, woven out of
nurture’s cloth and her infinite tapestry of cultural potential. These kinds of claims about the role of
biology in human behavior are at best incoherent, and at worst plain wrong. They are also dangerous
because they imply a view of human nature that is infinitely plastic, unconstrained by both universal
features of our biology, as well as individual differences that predispose some to extreme violence and
others to extreme altruism.
What makes the Seville Statement, and other claims like it incoherent is a set of false attributions
to biologists about the role of biology. Statements 2-5 are accurate in that it is incorrect to say that war or
violence are genetically programmed, subject to stronger selection than other kinds of behaviour, built
into the brain as a violent brain, and based on instinct with a single, inevitable output. But I don’t know
any biologists who believe statements like these. The biologist Peter Marler famously spoke of singing in
birds as an instinct to learn, while the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker described the Chomskyan
insight into language as the language instinct. A bird’s instinct to learn does not mean that there is a oneto-one,
inflexible mapping between genes or brain circuits and a specific type of song. All songbirds have
the potential to acquire their species’ song, and in some birds, such as mockingbirds and parrots, this
capacity extends to acquiring the sounds of other animals and even inanimate sounds. But if there is no
input at all, or if the bird is deafened, the output is deficient in structure, unrecognizable as a speciesspecific
song. The same holds for the language instinct. Instincts are biological biases that constrain the
range of potential variation. Biology differentiates songbirds from birds that don’t learn their songs. This
same biology allows some birds to learn one song and use it for life, and allows other birds to acquire a
variety of different sounds for use in singing. The biology doesn’t determine the specific content of a
song. The content is determined by what the bird hears, constrained by what its bird brain and syrinx will
process and reproduce. To a large extent, language is no different. Our biology allows us, but not any
other species, to acquire language. This same biology sets up constraints, due in part to what our brains
can keep in memory, what our ears can hear, and what our larynx can produce. Like songbirds, the
specific content of what we say, whether with a French or Vietnamese accent, is determined by where we
live and who we listen to.
If there is any intelligible sense of genetically programmed or instinct, whether for violence,
language, sex, or mathematics, it is that our biology provides us with the capacity to acquire these
domains of knowledge and expression. This doesn’t mean that violence, language, sex or mathematics are
inevitable or fixed in their expression. There are thousands of languages, ways of having sex, and forms
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 41
of mathematical expression. There are also thousands of ways of being violent, and equally, ways of
counteracting such violence. But none of this takes away from the importance of biology, especially its
role in constraining the form that these expressions take in different environmental settings. To think
otherwise is just wrong.
The debate about version 1.5 of lethal aggression gains interest if we restrict the conversation to
the similarities and differences between chimpanzee and human killing. Similarities speak to our shared
evolutionary history, including the mechanisms we inherited and the pressures that favored this form of
violence. Differences speak to both changes in our biology and the environments we confronted and
created.
Those who argue that the comparison between human and chimpanzee killing lacks any
analytical value come from two different camps. On the one hand are anthropologists such as Robert
Sussman and Brian Ferguson who suggest that chimpanzee killing is infrequent, has little benefit in terms
of resources or competition, and is restricted to populations that are either artificially provisioned by
humans or crowded in by us. They also suggest that the archaeological evidence for human warfare
doesn’t really begin until about 12,000 years ago. As Ferguson notes “To argue that war is a result of
some sort of innate predisposition to wage it requires that war be practiced throughout our prehistoric
past.” This date, so Ferguson continues, is too recent to invoke natural selection as a cause, and leaves
unexplained why there is no earlier evidence of massive killing if our last common ancestors had this
capacity.
These criticisms either fly in the face of contradictory evidence or have little to do with the
original ideas. Concerning chimpanzee killing, the evidence comes from multiple sites in East and West
Africa, including sites with no provisioning and no crowding from humans. Further, analyses by
Wrangham and his colleagues show that humans living as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers on the
continents of Africa and South America, engage in coalitionary killing, using stealthy raids and
imbalances of power to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits. Looking at 32 different small
scale societies, calculations of the median death rate were between 164-595 per 100,000 per year.
Looking at 9 chimpanzee communities spanning 5 populations in Tanzania, Uganda, and Ivory Coast, the
rate was 69-287 per 100,000 per year. Chimpanzees fall well within the range of human hunter-gatherers
and subsistence farmers. This evidence not only shows parallels between chimpanzees and human
societies living under conditions most like our ancestors, but also provides a resounding rejection of the
view that chimpanzee killing is infrequent and of trivial importance. If the rates of killing are comparable,
then either they are trivial for both species or trivial for neither. Given that both chimpanzees and human
hunter-gatherers live in small groups, killing even a few individuals can have a dramatic effect on their
capacity to defend resources.
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 42
A further parallel between chimpanzees and small scale human societies comes from analyses of
two extreme warring societies, the Waorani of New Zealand and the Yanomamo of Venezuela. Though
violence accounts for between 40-55% of all deaths in these two groups, attackers appeared immune to
injury, with no more than 5% dying in battle, and often no deaths at all. Chimpanzee attackers are
likewise immune to injury, due in large part to the strategic use of imbalances of power.
The parallels between chimpanzees and humans living in small scale societies supports the idea
that similar pressures favored the capacity for coalitionary killing in both species. Does this mean that
each of these species should always kill in this way, and thus, as argued by Ferguson, the archaeological
record should be chock full of deaths by coalitionary attackers? To argue for this position is to
misunderstand the nature of an adaptation, and the arguments put forth by Wrangham as well as the
evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and David Buss. As I discussed earlier on in this
chapter, adaptations are contingent upon particular environmental circumstances. What is adaptive today
need not be tomorrow. This is why it is not only unsurprising to see variation in the frequency of
coalitionary killing among chimpanzee sites, among humans living in small scale societies, and among
modern day humans who sometimes kill their spouses, stepchildren, and rivals, but predicted by
evolutionary theory. Adaptations are economically efficient solutions to particular social or ecological
problems. If those problems or pressures change, the original adaptation may have no impact on survival
or a negative impact. A hiatus in the archaeological record ⎯⎯ assuming this is the last word ⎯⎯ is
interesting with respect to the conditions that might favor or select against coalitionary killing, but in no
way undermines the logic of an evolutionary adaptation, one shared by chimpanzees and humans.
The second camp arguing against the parallels between humans and chimpanzees is defended by
the economist Samuel Bowles and his colleagues. Unlike the anthropologists, Bowles is entirely
sympathetic to biology but sees fundamental differences in the pattern of human killing and warfare. To
explain these differences he invokes two important attributes of human societies that have only weak
parallels in other species: large scale cooperation with unrelated others from the same group, together
with hatred, symbolic labeling, and the motivation to hurt all others outside the group. These two factors,
what Bowles calls parochial altruism, may have paradoxically generated both greater levels of
cooperation within groups and higher rates of warfare between groups. Those groups with the best
cooperators acquired the greatest resources and experienced the fewest losses due to cheaters and other
morally corrosive rogues. This power and inward-looking favoritism led to self-defensive emotions and
behaviors, ultimately leading to lethal aggression toward those with different beliefs and values. Thus
parochialism and altruism co-evolved, hand in hand, breeding prejudice as a result of group safety. This
evolutionary handshake resulted in warfare and our unique capacity as killers.
Bowles’ analysis is interesting and consistent with my explanation of how we evolved the
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 43
capacity for evil. For both Bowles and I, certain aspects of our capacity to harm others emerges as an
incidental byproduct of other capacities, and once this dynamic emerges, the combination of these
capacities can evolve and change. What Bowles’ analysis misses, however, is the fact that parochial
altruism could well be true, and so too could our shared capacity for killing with chimpanzees. As noted
above, rates of killing among chimpanzees and several small scale societies are comparable, and so too
are the costs and benefits to attackers and victims. This argues in favor of a shared history, and a shared
adaptation. It does not mean that all aspects of killing in humans are similar, or that the human mind froze
in a chimpanzee state with regard to its capacity to kill. It most definitely did not freeze.
Unlike the lethal attacks by chimpanzees that are restricted to cases where groups attack lone
victims, primarily from neighboring groups, we wreak havoc on a massive scale, with one on one, many
against many, and one against many, including victims within and outside our core group. Unlike
chimpanzees, even our young children have an appetite for violence that can be nurtured, as evidenced by
the brutality of child soldiers around the globe. Unlike chimpanzees, individuals will sacrifice themselves
for an entire group as evidenced most recently by suicide bombers in the Middle East. Unlike
chimpanzees, we derive great pleasure from watching others suffer, from watching violent movies, seeing
other animals fight, and imagining the decimation of an enemy. Our minds also generate ideological
reasons to motivate violence at extraordinary scales ⎯⎯ again, think of suicide bombers taking their lives
for a God, as well as the reward of an idyllic afterlife. And when our minds break down, or when we are
afflicted with particular disorders early in life, we are capable of experiencing bizarre appetites for
violence, including the joy of eating the flesh of murdered victims, having intercourse with dead bodies,
and asking for bondage and whippings to enhance sexual pleasure. These novel and unanticipated ways
of harming others are the result of new hardware that has evolved only once in the history of this planet.
HARMING OTHERS, version 2.0: requires Homo sapiens hardware
We depart from the pattern of adulticide seen in other animals because of our promiscuous brain. The
idea is not that our brains evolved for killing in these unique ways, but rather, that our unique style of
thinking led to novel ways of harming as an incidental consequence. The hardware that is our brain
enabled new ways of harming others, building on specialized adaptations, some shared with other species
and some uniquely human. The result is a brain that can develop a peculiar appetite for harming others.
To see how version 2.0 runs on our distinctively human hardware, let’s return to some of the core
microcontrollers that I discussed a few sections back. Recall that there are hormones like testosterone
that surge when individuals win a competition, whether this involves the physical fighting of deer using
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 44
their antlers, humans using their fists, or chess masters using their minds. Along with testosterone’s
increase is an increase in dopamine, a decrease in cortisol and serotonin, and a decrease in frontal lobe
activity and control. Within the environment of a promiscuous brain, this physiological ballet affects our
sense of fairness, empathy, moral conscience, attitude toward retribution and justice, as well our
willingness to engage in lethal aggression.
Brain imaging studies reveal that the prefrontal cortex plays an essential role in regulating our
aggressive instincts, when it’s working. When individuals respond aggressively to an unfair offer in a
bargaining game, testosterone levels rise and activity decreases in a part of the prefrontal cortex
associated with self-control. Thus, testosterone’s effectiveness in human aggression is facilitated by a
loss of control. Damage within this region of the brain causes abnormal aggressive responses to not only
direct insult, but even such trivial matters as being offered a lowish offer in the ultimatum game discussed
earlier. Anatomical and functional abnormalities within this region of the frontal lobes are also associated
with aggressive pathology, such as psychopathology. There are also individual differences in aggressive
tendencies among healthy people, due in part to differences in the patterns of activity between the right
and left prefrontal cortices. Heightened activity on the left is associated with greater sensitivity to reward,
lowered sensitivity to punishment, and considerably stronger aggressive responses to threatening stimuli,
such as an angry face. This is not simply a correlation, as evidenced by studies that experimentally either
suppress or increase activity in one hemisphere compared with the other. For example, if you contract
your right hand you will increase activity in the left hemisphere of the brain; conversely, contracting the
left hand increases activity in the right hemisphere. Subjects contracting the right hand in an
experimental setting showed more aggressive responses to insult than did subjects contracting the left
hand. The next time someone shakes a fist at you, check whether it is the right or left hand. If the person
is from a different group and holds a fundamentally different suite of ideological beliefs, which hand is
clenched is the least of your worries.
Favoritism toward those who are like us, combined with hatred toward those who are not, is
common in animals. As noted above, in-group favoritism or parochialism can lead to heightened levels of
cooperation within groups, while simultaneously increasing the level of hostility towards those outside.
Our promiscuous brain facilitated this co-evolutionary process, inviting the hormone oxytocin into the
mix. Among mammals, including humans, oxytocin is released in females during labor and breastfeeding,
and in both males and females during social bonding and parenting. This has led many to think of
oxytocin as the cuddle hormone or love drug. Floating within the human brain, oxytocin boosts trust in
games of cooperation, and greatly increases our ethnocentric biases. The Dutch psychologist Carsten De
Dreu and his colleagues ran a series of experiments that required male subjects to spray oxytocin or a
control up their noses. When oxytocin shoots up the nose, it goes straight to the brain. Relative to the
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 45
control group, those who sniffed oxytocin perceived in-group members as more likeable, more human,
more richly endowed with social emotions such as embarrassment, contempt, humiliation and admiration,
and more worthy of saving in an emergency. Oxytocin increases our sense of camaraderie toward those
within the inner sanctum, which can result in greater animosity toward those outside. Oxytocin may
therefore facilitate our ability to take out the competition even if this means killing another human being.
Oxytocin is two-faced, cuddling with its left profile and harming with its right.
This is a small sampling of the ways in which our promiscuous brain enables new forms of harm,
including killing other adults. We didn’t invent lethal aggression. We share this capacity with a small
group of animals that also kill other adults. But whereas these other species typically restrict their lethal
attacks to situations in which one group greatly outnumbers another, typically targeting adults from a
neighboring group, we evolved far beyond this monogamous approach. We adopted the cost-benefit
analysis that drives killing in other animals and applied it to killing in a virtually limitless space of
homicidal opportunities. We kill when we outnumber our opponents or are outnumbered by them,
attacking individuals within and outside our core group. We kill spouses, ex-lovers, stepchildren, those
who believe in God and those who don’t, the wealthy and the poor, kin and non-kin, and even ourselves if
the cause is good enough. Virtually anything goes.
Our promiscuous brains opened a Pandora’s box of harmful means, including the capacity to
address a multitude of injustices. This is a capacity that is inherently good, but incidentally bad. It is a
capacity that evolved in response to growing pressures to balance inequities and take care of those who
attempt to cheat society. It is a capacity that enabled us to engage in punishment in a broad range of
contexts, righting wrongs and opening a new path to feeling good about harming others.
Incidental justice
Cooperation is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, occurring in a wide range of situations.
Humans are no exception. Like ants, humans also bring resources to their queen ⎯⎯ think England. Like
scrub jays, humans work with extended family members to rear the next generation of offspring ⎯⎯ think
Mormons. Like dolphins, human males form super-coalitions to gain access to females ⎯⎯ think the
Yanomami Indians of South America, where men raid neighboring villages to take their women. And like
chimpanzees, humans cooperate to monitor their borders, often capturing and killing intruders ⎯⎯ think
Palestine and Israel. But human cooperation is distinctive in two ways: we frequently cooperate with
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 46
large numbers of genetically unrelated strangers, and punish those who cheat by free-riding on others’
good will.
The challenge to any cooperative enterprise is to avoid getting suckered by free-riders who cheat
and add little or no help. As group size grows, the opportunity to cheat and get away with it grows as
well given the challenges of storing information about reputation. How do individuals and groups avoid
this sucker problem?
When nonhuman animals cooperate with members of the same species, they typically target kin.
Helping kin provides a buffer against the sucker’s costs because investing in kin means investing in
genetic posterity. Helping relatives, even at a cost, translates to helping ones genes move on into the next
generation ⎯⎯ an insight developed by the British evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. When
cooperation involves unrelated others, nonhuman animals attempt to circumvent the sucker’s problem by
working with a small number of familiar others whose reputation is known, targeting contexts where all
participants benefit more from working cooperatively than working alone. These mutual benefits help
offset the costs of cooperation.
By restricting cooperation to relatives or small numbers of unrelated but familiar group members,
animal societies have buffered themselves from extreme cheating. This is significant because cheaters
arise in a variety of contexts where there are rules of engagement, including both cooperative and noncooperative
situations. For example, both lions and chimpanzees cooperate in group defense against
dangerous neighbors. Some individuals cheat by lagging behind, or failing to join in altogether. In
societies organized around hierarchies, low ranking animals sometimes cheat by attempting to eat more
than their fare share or by reproducing when their societal norms explicitly forbid it. Interestingly,
cheaters in cooperative situations such as those in lions and chimpanzees, never suffer any adverse
consequences from the dominants. In contrast, cheaters in competitive situations such as those that arise
in hierarchical societies, are punished. Nonhuman animals thus have the capacity to recognize and
change rule breakers. And yet, these capacities are not applied in the context of cooperative interactions.
Monogamous thinking rules.
When it comes to enforcing fairness in cooperation, the fundamental barrier for animals lies with
the economics of punishment. Punishment is costly. When a cheater is detected and attacked, there is
always the possibility that he will retaliate. Cheaters, even when caught, need not surrender without a
fight. Punishment therefore requires the capacity to surmount an immediate cost, while recognizing the
possibility that any benefit could be greatly delayed. For example, lashing out against a lion laggard or a
chimpanzee cheater might cause each to join in on future cooperative ventures, but this is a delayed
benefit, and it may never materialize. This adds another potential opportunity cost. As Shakespeare so
deftly noted “Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.”
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 47
Waiting for a future benefit, whatever its currency, is hard for all animals, humans included.
Studies of rats, birds, monkeys, apes, human children and adults show that individuals perceive future
gains as less valuable than immediate, but smaller gains. For example, give any one of these animals a
choice between one piece of food and ten, and they will pick the ten. More is better than less, except if
you are a dieting human. Now give them a choice between one piece available immediately and ten pieces
available after some delay. Virtually every animal shifts to the one piece, with the only comparative
difference linked to the length of the delay ⎯⎯ a few seconds for rats, birds, most monkeys, young
children, and adults with frontal lobe damage, a few minutes for some apes, older children and some
adults. Everyone is, to some extent, pulled by the hedonistic now. The future loses its luster when a tasty
alternative is just within reach. This is in part due to the uncertainty associated with the future, and in
part, the sheer temptation to take what is in front of us.
Unique evolutionary changes in the human brain allowed us to exert much greater patience,
overriding the pull of the hedonistic now. These changes didn’t evolve for punishment, but they were
readily deployed by this system of justice. We rely on creative strategies to place value on the future,
including putting resources away so that we can’t use them ⎯⎯ think savings accounts ⎯⎯ and making
verbal commitments that bind us to the future ⎯⎯ think about the social embarrassment of failing in front
of friends. These strategies help diminish the emotional pull of taking what is immediately available,
allowing future benefits to gain in attractiveness. This is a brain that can wait for the delayed benefits of
punishment.
The brain changes that facilitated our capacity to delay gratification were accompanied by others
that further offset the costs of punishment: our brains reward us with a feel-good feeling when we pay the
costs of punishment. For the first time in evolutionary history, the physical and psychological costs of
punishment were at least partially offset by the pleasure of justice served, whether delivered directly or
witnessed from afar.
When we punish or get even with those who have acted badly, we feel a hedonic high, an
experience captured by the metaphor “revenge is sweet but not fattening.” As demonstrated by the
economist Ernst Fehr, this is more than a metaphor. When we hand someone his just deserts, punishing
someone for cheating, lying, or breaking a promise, our brain responds as if we handed ourselves just
desserts, activating brain circuitry associated with reward. In one study, two subjects played a monetary
exchange game in which one player ⎯⎯ the donor ⎯⎯ decided how much of a pot of money to give to
another. A third player observed, out of view, the outcome of the exchange. In some cases, observers
witnessed a fair division of the money and in other cases, an unfair division in which the donor kept a
disproportionate amount of the total. The observer then faced a difficult decision: leave the two players
with their take-home earnings or use personal funds to take away money from the donor, returning it to
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 48
the bank. Taking money away from the donor is a form of costly punishment. It is costly in two ways: the
punisher loses money he could have kept, and the donor loses money that he unfairly kept in his previous
exchange.
When donors kept a significantly larger portion of the original sum, observers punished, paying
the costs. They also reported feeling good about taking down the cheapskates. Where was this honey hit
to the brain coming from?
To figure this out, Fehr and his colleagues put people in a brain scanner and used a technique
called Positron Emission Tomography or PET. This type of scanning provides a picture of how much
glucose is used up by different brain areas during a task. Higher glucose consumption occurs when there
is higher activity in a brain region. When punishers decided to punish a selfish donor, glucose
consumption increased in a region of the brain associated with reward: the dorsal striatum. This region is
also active when you eat ice cream, earn money, and solve an unexpected problem. Punishers incurred a
financial cost, but gained emotional elation and internal reward. It turns out that giving someone his just
deserts feels like eating dessert, but without the caloric gain.
When distinctively promiscuous punishment evolved, it transformed our capacity to cooperate
and to maintain conformity to social norms. It provided us with the tools to not only repair a puncture in
the system of norms, but to feel good about the costs personally incurred. When we punish, we have
served justice and served ourselves a helping of the brain’s rewards. The fossil record doesn’t capture
when we evolved the capacity to punish, as skulls and bones, stone tools, and even paintings are silent on
why someone received a spear through the head ⎯⎯ perhaps punished for a wrong doing or perhaps an
enemy, a competitor interested in the same resources, or a suspected lover. No one will ever know. What
we do know is that other primates never punish cheaters who break the norms of cooperation, whereas
hunter-gatherers dotting the continents do. Though people living today as hunter-gatherers are not perfect
replicas of what life was like way back when, they indicate that before we had sophisticated technology,
agriculture, and permanent residences, we had the capacity to minimize the costs of the sucker’s problem.
Whenever this capacity emerged in human evolution, it provided a critical part of the solution to the
problem of large-scale cooperation among unrelated strangers. With many eyes on the look out for
cheaters, and a capacity to take out or ostracize the free riders, cooperation emerged as a stable solution to
problems that are unsolvable at an individual level, including group defense and the acquisition of costly
resources. Punishment enabled humans to live in large, stable cooperative societies, many of whom are
unrelated strangers.
This momentous event in the history of cooperation carried with it a serious cost, bringing
aggression and reward into closer proximity, with the costs of attacking others overshadowed by the
benefits. As I discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, this economic transformation created, as an
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 49
incidental consequence, a hunger to watch violence and to see it as entertainment. It allowed our feelings
of inequity and envy to morph into schadenfreude, retaliation, and spite. It allowed us to enjoy violence
as perpetrators and spectators. It allowed us to put our money on feeling good about righting an injustice.
Why oh why?
Why did evil, expressed as excessive harm to innocent others, evolve? The answer lies, so I suggest, in a
special property of the human brain. Some time after we diverged from a chimpanzee-like common
ancestor, the human brain was remodeled to allow promiscuous connections between previously
unconnected circuits. Promiscuity enabled us to explore new problems using a combination of older, but
nonetheless adaptive parts. Some of these novel explorations led to highly adaptive consequences, as
when we developed the ability to self-deceive in the service of pumping ourselves up to do better in the
context of competition; or when we invented new technologies to solve difficult environmental problems,
such as using spears to capture prey at a distance; or, when we acquired the know-how to stockpile and
enhance resources such as food, water and fertile land that are critical to individual survival and
reproduction; or when we evolved the richly textured social emotions of jealousy, shame, guilt, elation,
and empathy, feelings that motivate individuals to recognize the importance of others’ well-being and
interests and to correct prior wrongs; or, when we tapped into the rich connection between reward and
aggression to punish cheaters trying to destabilize a cooperative society. But these same adaptive
explorations also resulted in incidental costs that have destroyed the lives of innocent individuals. The
capacity to deny others’ moral worth enabled us to justify great harms, including self-sacrifice as living
bombs designed to annihilate thousands of non-believers. The capacity to create advanced weaponry
enabled us to kill at a distance, thereby avoiding the aversiveness of taking out those staring back. The
capacity to stockpile resources led to the growth of greed, increasing disparities among members of
society, the inspiration to steal, and heightened violence both to defend and to obtain. The capacity to
experience social emotions such as jealousy led to blind rage and a driving engine of homicide, including
cuckolded lovers who kill their spouses and stepparents who kill their stepchildren. The capacity to feel
good about harming others enabled us to recruit this elixir in the service of causing excessive harm in any
number of novel contexts, from ethnic cleansings to bizarre fetishes that include self-mutilation. And the
list goes on. This is the yin and yang of promiscuous thinking. This is the natural history of evil, its
ancestry and adaptive significance. This evolutionary explanation sets the stage for unpacking the recipe
for evil, how it develops within individuals and societies, ingredient by ingredient.
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 50
Endnotes: Chapter 1
Recommended books
Bloom, P. (2010). How Pleasure Works. New York, Norton Press.
Coyne, J. A. (2009). Why Evolution is True. New York, Viking Press.
French, P. (2001). The Virtues of Vengeance. University of Kansas Press.
Goldhagen, D.J. (2009). Worse than War. New York, Public Affairs.
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• What’s religion for? Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought.
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58-62; Banerjee, K., Huebner, B, & Hauser, M.D. (2010). Intuitive Moral Judgments are Robust
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cooperation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(2), 60-65.
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& Richerson, P.J. (1992). Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in
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Gilbert, D. T. (2008). The paradoxical consequences of revenge. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 95 (6), 1316-1324; de Quervain, D.J-F., Fischbacher, U, Treyer, V.,
Schellhammer, M., Schnyder, U., Buck, A., & Fehr, E. (2004). The neural basis of altruistic
punishment. Science, 305, 1254-1258; Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in
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benefits of punishment. Science, 322(5907), 1510; Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (2001). Why people
punish defectors weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in
cooperative dilemmas. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208(1), 79-89; Henrich, J., Ensminger, J.,
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McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyantz, A., Ziker, J. (2006). Costly
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Quotes
Watts, D. P., Muller, M., Amsler, S. J., Mbabazi, G., & Mitani, J. C. (2006). Lethal intergroup aggression
by chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. American journal of primatology, 68(2), 161–180;
quote: p.g., 166
Seville Statement on Violence, Spain, 1986: http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=3247&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Ferguson, R. B. (2006). Tribal, “Ethnic,” and Global. In: The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflict:
From war to peace, volume 1, Nature vs Nurture (Ed. M. Fitzduff, C.E. Stout; Lawrence Erlbaum Ass),
1–15.; quote: p.g. 45
Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 54
Chapter 2:
Runaway desire
The desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and
directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all of our desires.
⎯⎯ Adam Smith
In 1999, an investment officer in a management firm had a gut feeling that something was wrong in a
corner of the securities market. Based on calculations from the stated investment strategy for the fund, the
returns were not only orbiting outside the financial stratosphere, but were mathematically impossible. The
officer contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlined the problem, and asked them to look
into it. No reply. Year after year, the officer continued to contact the SEC about this case, explaining that
it was potentially lethal, that he had no personal investments in the fund, and had never been an
employee. No reply. Then, in 2007, he sent the SEC a 17-page report, showing why there was only one
plausible conclusion: the stated strategy for the fund was a fraudulent cover up for a massive moneymaking
scheme. Eventually, in 2008, the brains behind this scheme was ousted, escorted to a life in prison
as number 61727-054, and welcomed to his new home by a community of like-minded white-collar
criminals.
Meet HARRY MARKOPOLOS ⎯⎯ the investment officer ⎯⎯ MADOFF SECURITIES ⎯⎯ the seductive
investment opportunity ⎯⎯ and BERNARD MADOFF ⎯⎯ the genius behind one of the most spectacular
Ponzi schemes in recorded history. Whistleblowers started warning the SEC as early as 1992, but no one
listened. Madoff was making money hand over fist by pocketing new investments and if needed, using
some of these to pay off individuals wishing to redeem their funds. Ponzi schemes work as long as new
investments exceed the number of investors wishing to redeem their own investments. And for Madoff,
this balancing act worked for 16 years. Then, as in the Bible’s Book of Joshua, the walls came tumbling
down, with Jericho riding in to hand Madoff a 150-year prison term for the financial murder of his
trusting clients. Altogether, these innocent and trusting people lost approximately $65 billion dollars, all
because one man allowed his desire for wealth and power to run out of control. Or so it seemed.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 55
Were those who put their money in Madoff securities entirely innocent? Or, like Madoff, did
they too allow their desire for more wealth to run wild? Was Madoff’s desire for extreme wealth that far
off the curve of human variation? And if he was off, who or what do we blame? Could some quirky
feature of Madoff’s genome, together with the brain states it orchestrates, have pushed him over the edge
into a universe of unreasonable and even irrational desires? Does it matter that Madoff grew up in a world
in which the rich get richer despite the direct or indirect harm caused to innocent others?
Many have speculated answers to these questions, based on little or no evidence, and certainly no
scientific evidence. But what matters most about case studies such as this is that they raise the kinds of
questions that science can answer. What matters is that it is possible to run a Ponzi scheme. It is possible
because there are humans like Madoff who are driven by the desire to accumulate great wealth, despite
the personal risks and costs to others. It is possible because the world is populated by people who are
willing to throw critical reasoning to the wind in the face of a tempting offer to make a huge amount of
money. It is possible because people will take risks either without considering the potentially horrific
consequences to innocent others, or by trivializing them.
As far as we know, Madoff never intended to put his friends and family members in a state of
financial ruin. As far as we know, many invested in his securities knowing that investments can fail. As
far as we know, some must have been suspicious, at least for a while, about how their investments could
consistently yield such over the top returns when nothing else has or seemingly could. Madoff is certainly
to blame for creating a fraudulent investment opportunity, but so too are the many who trusted him
without question, happy to make absurdly high returns.
Did Madoff cause excessive harm? Yes. Were those harmed innocent victims? Not entirely.
None were forced to invest, and all invested with at least some knowledge that the promised returns were
off the charts. This is not innocence. This is desire run amuck while self-control and reason fly standby.
Madoff was morally wrong, but not evil, at least not on my accounting of the ingredients of evil.
Madoff’s case illustrates the power of desire to stampede reason. As the essayist James Thurber
remarked, “Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn.” Madoff didn’t give a good
goddamn. How does a system like this get going, and then sometimes go wrong, very wrong? It all starts
with the elements of pleasure.
P for pleasure
Imagine that scientists have just announced the discovery of a center in the brain that manages our
experience of pleasure. Imagine further that they have invented a consumer device that, for only $49.99,
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 56
enables you to ramp up or down the activity in the pleasure center. Want to get a bit more out of your
dinner, a movie, tennis stroke, work, or sex? Flip the switch. Want to buffer yourself from the pain of
ostracism, a romantic break up, or a colonoscopy? Flip the switch. Would you buy it? If so, what would
you use it for, and would you be a habitual user? Would you worry about any side effects? Might using
this device become addictive, or worse, either destroy the feeling of pleasure altogether or push you into a
never-ending quest for satisfaction, with each dollop of pleasure leaving you wanting a bigger dollop next
time around. This may seem like science fiction, but it’s closer to non-fiction.
Over fifty years ago, scientists working with rats, implanted electrodes into in a region of the
brain called the nucleus accumbens. The electrodes were connected to a switch. If the rat pressed the
switch, it activated the electrode and thus stimulated this brain area. The rats indeed pressed, over and
over again, some at a rate of 2000 presses per hour, with no external reward or threat of punishment.
Pressing the switch was the reward, or at least the vehicle to what appeared to be the experience of
reward. Pressing the switch was addictive. These scientists had discovered a critical part of the circuitry
of pleasure, in rats! The rats discovered a pleasure switch, something they wanted to experience over and
over and over again.
Soon after this discovery, clinicians started using deep brain stimulation to treat individuals with
neurological complications, including Parkinson’s patients suffering from loss of motor control, patients
experiencing sustained pain, Tourette’s patients suffering from motor tics and obsessive-compulsive
problems, and even a patient in a coma who had lost, but then slowly recovered the capacity to name and
grasp objects. Similar to the rat work, the technique involves implanting an electrical pulse generator
within a targeted brain region. When the generator is turned on, it stimulates activity in previously
malfunctioning regions. But as with genetic manipulations and the unknown space that characterizes the
genomic universe, so too is the situation unchartered in the neuronal universe. Two patients suffering
from chronic pain were implanted with impulse generators and subsequently developed profound
addictions to the stimulation. In addition to relatively successful pain reduction, both patients experienced
an enhanced desire for sex, including erotic feelings. One of these patients self-stimulated so often that
she forgot to wash, change clothes, and adhere to family commitments. What happened? Did the
clinicians treating these patients hit the pleasure center? When stimulated, what actually changed in the
minds of these patients? Did they simply want more sexual arousal, suggesting that stimulation turned up
the gain on their desire for sex? Or, did stimulation change what they like, a shift in the sense of pleasure
that accompanies sex, and in this case, the anticipation of sex? Or perhaps it changed both wanting and
liking, especially since we often want things we like?
These observations of how humans and rats respond to brain stimulation show that particular
areas of the brain are linked to pleasure, especially the motivation to obtain rewarding experiences. These
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 57
observations also reveal that when these areas are activated, they can result in addictive, uncontrollable
behaviors that are toxic to self and others. They suggest that areas of the brain associated with desire can
run out of control. But to understand how the brain motivates us to want some things but not others, how
it creates the experience of liking, and how it enables us to want things we like by learning about the
world, we must turn to experiments on nonhuman animals, brain scans of healthy humans, the mechanics
of mind-altering drugs, conscious and unconscious influences on our choices, and the sad stories of
individuals with uncontrollable urges to eat, drink, snort, shoot up, and gamble. This is the evidence that
scientists, especially the American cognitive neuroscientist Kent Berridge, have gathered to explain the
three core elements of pleasure: wanting, liking, and learning.
Often, but not always, the experiences we want or desire are the experiences we like. Often, but
not always, the experiences we like are rewarding and good for our health. Often, but not always, we are
aware of the experiences we like, and make rational plans to experience them again. Often, but not
always, our rational plans to experience what we like makes us happy. Often, but not always, we find
ways to maintain our happiness by using self-control to moderate our exposure to pleasurable
experiences. The often refrain refers to the fact that the systems involved in wanting, liking, and learning
work in this way most of the time. The but not always refrain is a tip off to exceptions that speak to
interesting aspects of the machinery. For example, though we most often want things we like, we can
want things we don’t like and like things we don’t want. I want to lift weights, do push-ups and sit-ups to
stay fit, but I don’t really like doing any of these exercises. I like the Porsche Boxster sportscar, but don’t
want one because it is a gas guzzling environmental nightmare and inconveniently small for a family car.
The fact that wanting and liking can mount a unified front or conflict with each other shows that it is
important to look at the glue between them, which is learning. Learning allows us to work out our values,
setting up a preference profile for what we desire in the people we interact with, the places we visit, the
objects we handle, and the events we experience. Learning allows us to predict situations that generate
pleasure or pain. Though we are conscious of many of these processes, and can actively influence them,
unconscious processes are also at work. These systems of the brain link us to our evolutionary past, and to
animals without language but clearly expressed likes and dislikes.
Evolution has endowed all animals with unconscious wanting systems ⎯⎯ brain circuitry that
motivates individuals to seek resources that enable survival and reproduction. For young mammals, still
dependent upon parental care, their desires are simple: milk and warmth from their mothers, and
depending on the species, additional warmth and protection from fathers; for the record, the human father
is an oddity among primates, as no other ape and virtually no other monkeys express a paternal instinct.
With growth and independence, desires shift to other resources that can satisfy hunger and thirst,
accompanied by sexual and social status desires. Though driven by unconscious operations, the behaviors
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 58
that result are often strategic, dependent upon changes in climate, other competitors, who happens to be in
a bad mood, and who is sexually active. In a variety of species, from dung beetles to deer, biologists have
developed mathematical models that accurately predict how long an individual should wait for a sexual
partner or feed in a food patch. The accuracy of these models shows that individuals’ desires for resources
linked to survival and reproduction are captured by lawful principles or rules. This is important because it
means we understand how the machine underlying behavior works. It means we understand how animals
make certain choices.
Understanding how wanting works is straightforward. In both humans and nonhuman animals,
we can measure what individuals approach when we give them a choice, as well as how much effort they
are willing to exert while approaching and gaining access to a particular object or experience. For
example, in studies that explore whether captive animals are provided with sufficient housing conditions,
an experimenter presents individuals with a choice of rooms, one consisting of the typical housing
environment and the others by the addition of goods believed to be of interest. To enter a given room
requires opening a door. To determine how much an individual really wants what is in another room, the
experimenter ramped up the difficulty of opening each door. In studies of captive hens and mongoose,
individuals exerted considerable effort to open some doors but not others. Hens rammed into doors
opening onto a chipped wood floor, whereas mongoose did the same for a pool of water. These are items
they want, but do not get in captivity.
What about liking? It may seem, at first blush, that because liking is a subjective experience, that
there are no clear objective ways to measure it. My likes are my own. You can’t possibly know what it
is like to be me. If you can’t know what it is like to be me, then we can’t possibly know what it is like to
be a mongoose, mouse or monkey. There are, however, ways of measuring liking and disliking that are
reliable, objective, and consistent across species. In many animals, including human babies who can’t
speak and human adults who have lost this capacity due to brain injury, there are distinctive behaviors
that are consistently linked to positive experiences and others linked to negative ones. For example, in
mice, monkeys, and human babies, tasting something sweet like sugar causes a lot of lip licking, whereas
tasting something bitter such as quinine causes mouth gaping, nose twitching, and arm flailing. These
similarities show that evolution has been conservative, maintaining the same underlying mechanisms for
handling likes and dislikes. These similarities have enabled scientists to understand how the brain systems
involved in wanting and liking can change together or separately, even though they can’t help us
understand the harder problem of what, in particular, it is like for a given mouse, monkey or man to like
something.
To understand the machinery that drives rodent wants or desire, Susana Peciña and Kent Berridge
took advantage of the genetic technique that Joe Tsien ⎯⎯mentioned in the last chapter ⎯⎯ used to create
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 59
smart mice. Recall that Tsien jazzed up a gene’s expression to improve memory and learning. In
contrast, Peciña and Berridge quieted a gene that controls the amount of dopamine floating around in
between neurons. With this gene silenced, dopamine levels increased. Compared with normal mice, these
dopamine-plus mice consumed twice as much food and water, and learned much faster where food was
located within a maze. But when it came to measuring licking as liking, the dopamine-plus mice were no
different from normal mice. Dopamine is therefore essential for the wanting system, but not the liking
system. This conclusion has been supported by many other studies, of mice and men, in the context of
eating and drug addiction ⎯⎯ two topics that I will shortly revisit.
To understand what rodents like, Peciña and Berridge injected an opioid drug ⎯⎯ similar to opium
from poppy plants ⎯⎯ into two brain regions associated with reward ⎯⎯ the nucleus accumbens and the
ventral pallidum. Not only have studies of rodents, monkeys, and humans revealed that these areas are
associated with reward ⎯⎯ recall the brain stimulation studies ⎯⎯ but they contain sub-regions known as
hedonic hotspots ⎯⎯ zones tuned to particular kinds of stimulation, designed to jazz up the liking element
of pleasure. Following injection, individuals licked four times more often in response to sugar as the noninjected
individuals, but did not show a difference in wanting. The opioid injections also caused a
decrease in the aversiveness of bitter quinine, as evidenced by a decrease in mouth gaping. Turning on
these hedonic hotspot ramped up the pleasure of sweets, and diminished the displeasure from bitters.
Together, the Pecina and Berridge studies highlight the independence of wanting and liking, and the ways
in which the brain ⎯⎯ or a clever experimenter playing with it ⎯⎯ regulates the elements of pleasure.
How does the brain figure out what’s hot and what’s not, delicious or disgusting? It’s one thing
to desire a particular experience, and another to derive pleasure from the experience. But the world is not
set up with labels that indicate which objects and events are pleasurable and which distasteful. Every
object and event has particular properties that, depending on the animal’s sensory ability, can be seen,
heard, tasted, smelled, or touched. For all organisms, there are receptors within each of the sensory
modalities that are biased to prefer some things over others. This is why no human baby has to be taught
to dislike bitter things and like sweet things. From the very first encounter, sugary solutions trigger
tongue protrusions and licking, whereas bitter solutions trigger a gaping mouth. We have evolved, as have
other animals, sensory systems that are tuned to prefer some things and dislike others, right from the start.
These initial biases guide the learning process, facilitating acquisition of new knowledge in some cases,
making it almost impossible in others, and setting a course to self-destruction in yet others. Try teaching
a young child that the taste of sweet chocolate is disgusting while the taste of bitter endives is delicious.
Try teaching cocaine addicts to turn off the magnetic pull of white powder, or convincing alcoholics that
the clinking sound of ice in a glass isn’t meaningful. Try teaching rogue soldiers involved in genocide
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 60
that the parasitic enemy shouldn’t be exterminated. This is where scientific explanation gains
considerable interest, helping us understand how we develop anticipatory pleasures and past-oriented
regrets, struggle to change from habitual rewards, and acquire irrational desires for experiences we no
longer enjoy ⎯⎯ a problem that appears to maintain most forms of addiction.
Humans go to restaurants and bees to flowers because both are associated with food. Within these
broad categories, there are good restaurants and flowers, as well as bad ones, where good and bad are
determined by experience. The experience can be direct, as when food is actually consumed, or indirect
as when humans listen to an animated friend describe a restaurant’s menu and bees watch a hive mate
dance, providing a description of the flower’s location and quality. Once the association between food
and location is established, simply seeing the restaurant or flower triggers a cascade of neural and
chemical activity in the brain linked to reward and the anticipation of pleasure. The restaurant and
flower are cues that predict food. If you walked into your favorite restaurant and found that they sold
fertilizer rather than food, you would be heartbroken. If you haven’t been to the restaurant in a long time,
but memorialized your previous experience as a gastronomic high, you will be deeply disappointed if
your first bite doesn’t live up to the standards you anticipated. This mismatch between anticipated and
experienced reward will lead to a cascade of brain activity ⎯⎯ indicative of an error. The primary engine
driving the experience of reward, including predicting when it will occur and with what kind of intensity,
is the dopaminergic system, a network of brain areas that releases dopamine in most invertebrates and
vertebrates, including the human vertebrate.
Many natural behaviors trigger dopamine, including male songbirds singing to attract females,
rhesus monkeys seeing a red light that has been associated with a soon to be delivered shot of juice, and
humans cooperating with each other. Many unnatural behaviors and objects can also trigger dopamine.
Animals trained to press a switch for food, will often become obsessively attracted to the switch,
caressing and biting it even in the absence of food; humans with addictions to cigarettes, food and
gambling, will often obsessively fondle an empty cigarette carton, fork, and deck of cards, respectively.
But these correlations leave open the question of whether dopamine causes the anticipation or experience
of reward, or flows from these experiences.
To tackle the causality problem requires experiments, either directly changing dopamine
concentration or comparing individuals who, due to genetic differences, show differences in dopamine
levels. We know from studies of rodents and monkeys that selectively increasing dopamine with drugs
results in heightened wanting of food if there are cues to foraging, or sex if opportunity knocks. The
Israelian cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot pursued a similar approach with healthy humans subjects.
She first asked individuals to rate how happy they would be if they vacationed in 80 possible destinations.
Then, some subjects took a placebo while others took L-dopa, a drug that selectively increases the release
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 61
of dopamine. Later, these same subjects imagined what it would be like to actually vacation in these
places, and rated their imagined experience. Those on L-dopa felt they would be much happier, revealing
the power of dopamine to cause changes in our experience of reward. Complimenting these experimental
results are studies showing that genetic variation in the expression of dopamine in humans are closely tied
to impulsive behaviors and behavioral disorders. Thus, individuals with genetic variants that result in
higher levels of dopamine are more likely to engage in compulsive gambling and eating, leading to
addictions. The anticipation of heightened pleasure leads these gamblers, eaters, and abusers to want
more and more.
This work shows that dopamine is necessary for monitoring and guiding our desire for reward,
with evidence of individual differences that start with our biology. This is a highly adaptive system. But
changes in dopamine can also cause our desire for reward to runaway, like a brakeless trolley. This is a
highly maladaptive process. This flip between adaptive and maladaptive that we see within the
dopaminergic system is, by now, a familiar brain routine. It provides, I believe, the means to explain all
manners of excess, from the desire for food and money to drugs and violence.
Obesity and drug addiction are disorders of excess. They are disorders of insatiable desire. There
are many paths to obesity and addiction, but all ultimately point to changes in the reward system. In
humans born with deficient levels of the hormone leptin, overeating and obesity are common outcomes.
When these individuals view images of food during a brain scanning session, they show lower levels of
activity in the striatum than non-leptin deficient individuals. The striatum is an area that is rich in
dopamine and an essential part of the reward system. This may, at first, seem paradoxical: how could
those who eat to excess not show an excess of activity in the striatum, and thus, an over-the-top
experience of reward upon seeing food? The answer lies in studies of rodents and humans. Whether it is
obese rats or obese people, both show compulsive eating, but lower levels of expression of dopamine in
the striatum. If you silence a key dopamine gene in rats, you can quickly turn them into food junkies,
driven by an unsatisfied wanting system. Overeating, like over-drugging, turns the reward dial down.
This is an adaptive response, except when it operates in the mind of a food or drug junky. Though the
reward hits are small and unnoticeable, the wanting system remains highly motivated, triggered by the
same cues. What food and drug junkies want is more hits, but the reward system isn’t delivering. This
causes them to want even more.
What the work on obesity and addiction tell us is that independently of how people get started on
the path to fulfilling their desires, and whatever leads them to over-consume, consumption loses its luster.
The brain is smart: excess is bad and thus the reward systems turns off. But because the wanting or desire
system is independent from the reward system, and has evolved insurance against a complete shut down,
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 62
it continues to drive desire. Because the reward system isn’t delivering the goods, excess unfolds driven
by a wanting system that is looking for pleasure in all the wrong places.
When we were hunters and gatherers, excess was an unborn concept. We lived on the edge then,
enjoying scraps of whatever kill arrived on the fireplace, together with the tubers gathered up on the day.
We, at least many of us in the West, live in a world that has a 24/7 cafeteria of food and drugs. It is a want
it-have it culture. As work in molecular biology shows, and as I will pick up in chapter 4, some of us start
off more vulnerable than others, susceptible to sampling from the cafeteria at all hours of the day and
night. The combination of a heavily marketed environment and a biological susceptibility to excess, is a
losing combination for the consumer.
The work on addiction provides a template for thinking about how individuals and societies ignite
a path to excessive harms. In the same way that excessive eating gets going and going out of control
when the dopamine system drives an irrational desire to want more and more food that is liked less and
less, so too is excessive harm often driven by a similar decoupling between wants and likes. Individuals
start with a desire to acquire wealth, to physically harm those who are unlike them, or taste the sweetness
of revenge against someone who acted unfairly. These desires are often linked to an experience of
pleasure or the anticipation of pleasure. But as such actions and their consequences accumulate, the
pleasure derived diminishes, as money is acquired just for the sake of having more, while individuals are
injured, maimed, or killed because this is the policy that must be pursued. Liking is no longer part of the
equation, leaving cold desire to do its work at the expense of innocent others who get in the way.
To develop this idea, and especially the link to excessive harm, I have to fill in a missing piece in
our discussion of desire. Everything I have discussed in this section has focused on individuals and their
core corporal needs for survival ⎯⎯ or in the case of drugs, recreation. I haven’t said a word about how
desire works in the social arena, whether the same systems are in play when we compare our own desires
and resources with others, or with other opportunities. When desire is motivated by what others have or
have achieved, are the same processes in play as when we eat, drink, or gamble? These are important
questions as the desire to accumulate great wealth or to harm others is often motivated by comparison
shopping, assessing what others have relative to our own status. The most primal starting point for
comparison shopping is the world of hierarchies, a world where the desire to dominate rules.
Power hungry
Whether you are observing a social insect, fish, lizard, bird, rat, whale, monkey, or human, males are
bigger and bolder, more boisterous, brash and brazen, and more motivated to get into a brawl than
females. Though biologists don’t define the sexes based on these differences, they use them to understand
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 63
what drives competition for valuable resources and what determines the criteria for dominance status.
Biologists define the sexes based on differences in the gonads, the reproductive organs that generate eggs
and sperm, and the corresponding effects of sex-specific selection on the mind, body, and behavior.
Females are those with larger, more costly gonads, where cost is defined on the basis of how much energy
is invested in production. Think eggs versus sperm. This difference sets up an immediate competition,
especially for species that have parental care. Once you invest in a big expensive egg, you don’t want to
lose your investment. You want to protect it, avoiding harm and minimizing risk. On the other hand, if
your investment is small, you are not only freer to take risks, but favored to do so.
These ideas started with Charles Darwin. One hundred years later, they were developed in
exquisite detail by the American evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Combined, they provide an
explanation for why, in most species including our own, males compete with each other for access to
females ⎯⎯ the most valuable and limited resource ⎯⎯ and why females are picky, expressing an aesthetic
preference for males of a particular quality. Selection favors parts of the body and brain associated with
dominant males and picky females. Dominant males win fights against other males, and thus gain access
to females. Dominant males take risks and are more aggressive. Picky females hold out for the best males,
those who provide the most desirable resources. Picky females are patient, waiting for males with good
genes, access to prime real estate, and the protective skills and motivation to defend them and their young.
These are qualities linked to high status. These are qualities associated with the ability to obtain and
control resources. These are the qualities that females desire.
Male desire for dominance is therefore nurtured by female desire for dominant males. Like
appetites, these desires seek satisfaction. Like appetitive addictions that create devastating consequences
for individuals, groups and nations, so too can our appetite for domination.
Recall from the last chapter that testosterone and cortisol play a teeter-totter role in aggressive
competition. When testosterone is high and cortisol is low, the motivation to fight and defend one’s
resources is high. These two hormones, and the brain areas they impact, fuel the desire to maintain a
competitive edge. Recall further that winners experience an increase in testosterone, and losers a
decrease, and that testosterone is addictive. Testosterone is therefore part of the system that links the
desire to outcompete and gain dominance status with the rewarding experience of winning and achieving
high rank.
To attain high rank, including a competitive advantage over others with respect to food and
mating opportunities, requires social knowledge. How tough is the alpha baboon or boss in a company,
and what kind of support do they have from other individuals in the group? How sexually receptive are
females when their hormonal cycles tilt them into a period of potential conception? What other males are
interested in these females? Attaining and maintaining high rank also requires attention to cues that are
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 64
continuously changing, including where someone is looking and parts of the body that signal power and
sexual availability. The American neuroscientist Michael Platt carried out a clever series of experiments
to understand how much male rhesus monkeys value different kinds of social information and how much
they will pay to obtain it. As in our discussion of wanting and liking, Platt rightly assumed that rhesus
monkeys would value most what they like most, and that they would pay the highest price for what they
are most motivated to acquire.
Each monkey watched a slide show with viewing options akin to pay-per-view television. On a
given trial, they could watch one of two images for as long as they liked, each viewing option associated
with a particular amount of juice. For each pair of images, one delivered more juice than the other. Given
that these were thirsty monkeys , they should prefer more juice over less juice. If monkeys have no
interest in the images per se ⎯⎯ because they have no value ⎯⎯ then their viewing preferences should be
strictly determined by where they can get the most juice. If, on the other hand, the images have value,
and some images are more valuable than others, then they may be willing to look at an image that delivers
less juice over an image that delivers more. This is costly viewing. This is paying for watching.
Evidence for such preferences would reveal that rhesus monkeys value the social information that comes
from the image over the juice itself, a surprising result given that juice is a primary reward whereas the
image is only a secondary reward, indicative of things to come.
Consistently, these male monkeys had two favorite channels, preferring those showing pictures of
high ranking individuals and close-ups of female hindquarters. They preferred these over images of low
ranking individuals, despite the fact that this choice often cost them the opportunity to drink more juice.
Platt's findings show that monkeys are motivated to acquire information about socially relevant
situations, including information about dominance and sex. Their motivation or desire to obtain this
information is high, as evidenced by the fact that they are willing to pay a cost. Keeping an eye on a
dominant is of value as dominants pose a threat, especially one staring at you. Keeping an eye on a
female’s hindquarters is also of value as it can signal sexual receptivity: in rhesus monkeys, as in many
other monkeys and apes, the area around the vagina either swells, turns red, or both when females are
ovulating. This is important information for males in their attempts to court and mate females. I will
quickly pass over the potential implication of these results for thinking about the origins of pornography.
Humans also value social information, with many hours in a day devoted to obtaining such
information through gossip. Many of us live in a world where dominance matters, whether it is climbing
to the top of a corporate chain or attaining the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Individuals
seek high status because of the physical and health benefits that accrue. In such societies, our sense of
self is based on our comparison with others. It is also based on a strong sense of independence,
autonomy, assertiveness, and uniqueness. In other societies, the self dissolves into the other, with an
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 65
emphasis on inter-dependence, commonness, and openness to change in response to authority. These
differences in self-perception show up when we attend to faces of familiar individuals. Chinese subjects,
representative of a collectivistic and inter-dependent society, responded more quickly to seeing their
boss’s face than seeing their own face. In contrast, American subjects responded more quickly to their
own face than to any other person’s face, including that of their boss. Like Platt’s monkeys, therefore, we
too place value on social information. Unlike Platt’s monkeys, our sense of value in the social domain is
modulated by our cultural upbringing. This modulation, and the brain states that accompany it, shows up
in direct comparisons of individuals who are motivated to attain high dominance status with those who
are motivated to create equality.
The American social psychologist Joan Chiao used survey information to establish two groups of
individuals based on those who preferred to live in an egalitarian society and those who preferred a
hierarchical society. These individuals then entered a brain scanner and viewed pictures of people
experiencing pain. Two areas, both associated with the personal experience of pain and the perception of
pain in others, were highly active. But these areas were less active in those who preferred hierarchies
than those who preferred egalitarianism. This finding, as Chiao notes, is consistent with the idea that in
an egalitarian society, empathy for others well-being is essential. In egalitarian societies, seeing someone
who has less or is being harmed by another, should motivate a desire to redress the imbalance and reduce
the harm. In a dog-eat-dog hierarchical society, where dominants outcompete subordinates and inequities
are part of life, concern for those at the bottom is a sign of weakness. These results show how cultural
influences can shape brain activity, leading some to develop deep desires for dominance and inequities,
whereas others develop deep desires for equality. These brain areas heighten our sensitivity to what others
have, what we desire, and how our desires are modulated by what others have. These comparisons
motivate us to improve our status either by working harder ⎯⎯ a good thing ⎯⎯ or taking down those
above us ⎯⎯ a bad thing.
I’ll have what she’s having
One of the most famous lines in movie history was delivered by Estelle Reiner in When Harry Met Sally,
a comedy produced by her son Rob Reiner. While Estelle is seated at a table in a delicatessen, Sally ⎯⎯
played by Meg Ryan ⎯⎯ fakes having an orgasm to show Harry ⎯⎯ played by Billy Crystal ⎯⎯ that he
can’t tell the difference between fakes and the real deal. Overhearing Ryan’s performance, Estelle turns
to the waiter and says “I’ll have what she’s having.” This is comparative shopping, cashing in on
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 66
someone else’s subjective experience to guide our chosen experiences.
Orgasms and eating are two of the great pleasures in life, whether you live in Tokyo, Toronto,
Toulouse, Tehran or Timbuktu? I doubt any healthy human adult would debate this. What can be debated
is what counts as the ultimate orgasm or food experience. It can be debated both among friends and
inside our own minds, influenced by personal experience and our knowledge of what else is available, or
might be.
Consider potato chips. As a snack, potato chips generate a revenue in the United States of about
$6-7 billion dollars each year, relying on the slicing and frying of about 2 billion pounds of potatoes.
These facts make clear that most Americans love potato chips, and are motivated to consume them. Like
other salty snacks, it is hard to eat just one. The American psychologist Carey Morewedge and his
collaborators ran an experiment to find out how much people love potato chips, and whether their
anticipated fondness for this delicious crisp changes in the face of other options. Subjects sat at a table in
front of a bowl of potato chips and an alternative food that was visible, but out of reach. The alternative
was either a highly undesirable snack such as sardines, or a highly desirable one such as Godiva
chocolate. After subjects contemplated what it would be like to eat each of these foods, they then rated
how much they would enjoy them. This is like the study I described in the pleasure section where subjects
rated how much they would enjoy different vacation destinations, but without the comparison between
one clearly good and one clearly bad spot. Both focus on the anticipation of a pleasurable experience.
Subjects’ ratings of potato chip deliciousness soared when sardines were on offer, and plummeted
in the presence of chocolate. Context matters. What is clearly delicious when there is nothing else on the
table, loses or gains in deliciousness when the table fills up with other delectable or disgusting
alternatives.
What’s happening to our pleasure detector, and especially our anticipated reward system, in the
potato chip experiment? Are we incapable of understanding what makes us happy, unable to figure out
what is or is not delicious, or are we fickle? What Morewedge’s experiment reveals is that deliciousness,
like ugliness, stubbornness, and obsequiousness, is a judgment, judgments are always relative or
comparative, and as such, based on some standard that is either present in the moment, stored away in
our memories, or anticipated in the future. When Estelle Reiner uttered her famous line, she was using
Meg Ryan’s orgasmic expression of delight as a comparative metric. When we compare food items or
wine or pretty faces or sporty cars, we recruit our brain’s resources, especially the circuitry involved in
attention, emotion and memory. Whether we say that potato chips are the best snack, or better than
sardines, we have made a comparison that requires our attention, our capacity to keep at least two items in
memory, and a way of emotionally tagging each of the items. This comparison-shopping taxes our
mental resources, recruiting them away from the job of evaluating one snack, and leading to a distorted
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 67
evaluation of desirability.
Morewedge’s experiments point to a mismatch between how delicious something is and how
delicious we think it will be, or how delicious we thought it was. It reveals a distortion in our capacity to
anticipate ⎯⎯ or forecast in the words of the American social psychologist Daniel Gilbert ⎯⎯ how we will
feel, and in particular, how much we will like the experience. This is a problem for the elements of
pleasure that I laid out earlier in this chapter, as we expect the system that links wanting and liking to be
well honed, even optimized to make sure that we really want things we really like. Is this distortion
something to expect across the board, independently of context, or is it specific to our food? Is the social
domain similarly vulnerable to a distorted view of anticipated pleasure?
Consider revenge. When someone transgresses over the borders of social norms, either harming
us or those we care about, we often seek revenge, motivated to even things up. We often imagine that
revenge will make us feel better, providing a honey hit to the brain that will satisfy our desire to redress
an imbalance. But is this the outcome we consistently achieve when we follow through on a plot of
revenge or, as Sir Frances Bacon noted over three hundred years ago, might “A man that studieth revenge,
keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.” In more modern and plain
English, might our desire for revenge inoculate us against healing, creating an illusion that we will feel
better? If so, revenge looks like an addictive process, with wanting unhinged from liking.
The American psychologist Kevin Carlsmith set up an experimental game that allowed each
subject within a group to contribute money to a public good. At the end of one round, the bank multiplied
the total by a pre-determined amount, divided this total by the number of players, and then redistributed
this amount to each player. In this game, the best for each player in the group is to contribute to the
common pot because this maximized the returns. However, the best strategy for an individual is to defect,
holding on to the initial endowment while reaping the rewards of everyone else’s generous contributions.
Those who opt out of cooperation in a public good situation stand to benefit, especially in a world with no
punishment.
Carlsmith created an experimental world of punishment for some players, but not all, and then
explored how punishment contributed to a subject’s feelings. Some could pay to punish, some witnessed
the consequence of another’s punitive act, and some had no exposure to a game involving punishment.
When given the opportunity to punish the defector, most people punished. Everyone, both
punishers and non-punishers alike, expected punishment to feel good. They were wrong. Both punishers
and those who witnessed punishment felt worse, with the act of punishment compounding the bad
feelings. The fact that the witnesses felt worse, as opposed to better, may seem at odds with our
experience of schadenfreude, of enjoying another’s misery. Shouldn’t the witnesses have rejoiced upon
discovering that the offenders were slapped with a punitive fine? In our own personal experience with
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 68
schadenfreude, as well as in studies that I will explore in a few sections, witnesses learn of a misfortune
that happens to another but this news has no direct bearing on the witness. In Carlsmith’s experiments, the
witnesses learn of a misfortune, but the offender’s defection has a direct bearing on the witness in terms
of money lost. Thus, although punishment may feel good, the benefit may not make up for the lost
income.
Everyone in Carlsmith’s experiments also believed that punishment would cause people to think
less about the offender. They were wrong again. Punishers, but not those who simply witnessed
punishment, ruminated more about the selfish offenders. Rumination led to more bad feelings. These bad
feelings led to more rumination, giving birth to a vicious cycle of feeling bad and ruminating about those
who cheated them of some money. Rumination heightened the comparative difference in resources.
Carlsmith’s findings are paradoxical and disturbing. Paradoxically, they suggest that in some
situations, our expectations about the feeling of punishing an immoral act are inverted from the feelings
we feel following punishment: rather than feeling a happy high, we feel a depressing low, often
accompanied by increasing anger. In the context of punishing a free-rider who stiffed the group, everyone
expects to feel a tingle of delicious delight, but many end up feeling angry instead. The entire polarity of
the emotion has switched, with rumination and anger dominating our thoughts. This is a dangerous state
to enter. Faced with the strong belief and desire that revenge should feel good, but lacking any
confirmation, we are moved to find new evidence. With anger at the helm, there is only one solution:
escalate the level of punishment, and continue to do so until it feels good. This is precisely the pattern I
described above for obesity: the wanting system continues to search for liking and reward, but fails, and
thus continues. Whether it is an unsatisfied desire for food or revenge, the unfortunate consequence is an
escalation to excess. Evil isn’t far behind, fueled by a variety of situations in which we fail to obtain what
we want.
The great leveler
We are often envious of those who have what we desire, whether it is good looks, money, a warm
supportive family, or a better tennis stroke. Envy can motivate us to change our looks, find careers that
will improve our finances, seek relationships that will provide additional support, and pick up a few extra
tennis lessons to win the next match. Unfortunately, envy can quickly turn, as desire and a deep sense of
inferiority transform into insatiable cravings to acquire whatever is necessary to gain superiority. Envy
thus wears two masks, one benign and inspirational, the other malignant and destructive. As the writer
Dorothy Sayers noted, envy “is the great leveler; if it cannot level things up, it will level them down.”
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 69
Envy emerges out of our sense of fairness, fueled by competition. It is part and parcel of a
hierarchical society. When we envy someone, we have detected a difference or inequity between our own
condition and that of another. We want what someone else has, presumably because we like what they
have. Wanting and liking are in harmony. Recognition of the inequity fuels competition to redress the
imbalance. This sense of fairness appears early in child development, changing in systematic ways as a
function of a culture’s norms.
The Swiss economist Ernst Fehr, who led the brain imaging studies of punishment and reward
discussed in Chapter 1, assembled a team of developmental psychologists to test for evidence of fairness
in young children ages 3-8 years old. Fehr was especially interested in when children recognize a
disparity or inequity in the distribution of resources, and what they are willing to do, if anything, to
redress the imbalance. The experimenter paired up each child with a partner of the same age who was
either from the same school or a different school; the school distinction was set up to look at in-group
versus out-group differences which, as discussed in chapter 1, can lead parochial altruism ⎯⎯ the
paradoxical result of greater cooperation among group members and greater hatred and violence toward
those outside. Though each child knew about their partner’s age and school affiliation, they never saw
their partner. Each child therefore knew only that they were playing with someone from their school or
someone unfamiliar to them.
Each child played three different games. In each game, the experimenter told one child to decide
how to distribute a fixed amount of candy. In the prosocial game, the decider either takes one candy and
gives one to the partner or takes one candy and gives nothing to the partner. If children are sensitive to
inequities and want to share in order to make things fair, they should pick the 1-1 option; picking the 1-0
option doesn’t affect the decider, but dings the partner. In the envy game, the decider has a choice
between 1-1 and 1-2. As in the prosocial game, the decider gets the same amount of candy with both
options, but preserves equity with 1-1. Picking 1-1 also reveals that the child has an aversion to others
having more, even when there is no personal cost. In the third, sharing game, the decider has a choice
between 1-1 and 2-0. Here again, the decider gets candy in both cases, but the 2-0 option tempts the
desire for more, both personally and relatively. On the one hand, a greedy child will want more candy,
and so 2 wins over 1. But picking the 2-0 option also leads to a greater difference with the partner, while
robbing them of an opportunity for any candy. If fairness prevails, deciders should pick 1-1. If
selfishness prevails, motivated by competition, they should pick 2-0.
Across all three games, there was an increasing tendency from age 3 to 8 years old for children to
pick the fair distribution (1-1). Across all ages and games, children were most likely to pick the fair
distribution when playing against familiar than unfamiliar schoolmates. What these results reveal,
together with many other similar studies, is that children are sensitive to the distribution of goods at an
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 70
early age, but with important developmental changes in play. There is a tendency for children to both
recognize inequities early in life, but to act selfishly when possible. The envy game shows this
beautifully. When another child could receive more, children rejected this option even though it wouldn’t
cost them directly: the decider always gets just one candy. Though no one has yet worked out what
causes a developmental shift from more to less selfishness, most agree that it is driven by maturation of
brain regions guiding self-control, together with social factors that make young children increasingly
aware of and sensitive to their own and others’ reputations. Fehr’s studies also show that playing fair is
not just about the distribution of resources, but about who gets them. Early in life, children have already
carved up the world into those they know and those they don’t. This division drives their thinking and
feeling, and in cases like this, their sense of fairness. Young children are well on their way to developing
parochial altruism.
Fehr’s research, and the majority of studies on the child’s developing sense of fairness, focus on
children living in large-scale Western societies. Most of the work on fairness in adults is similarly
focused on large scale societies. The precise structure of these societies may directly impact how
individuals decide when to share, what commodities enter into the distribution, and whether sharing
depends on effort invested, needs, and power. As noted in the last section, those who support an
egalitarian society are more likely to feel empathy toward those in pain than those who support a
hierarchical society. Individuals who are more empathic are also more altruistic. Hunter-gatherer
societies tend to be more egalitarian, and highly cooperative. These differences predict further
differences in how those living in small-scale societies, including the hunter-gatherers and subsistence
farmers of Africa, Asia, and South America, should respond to unfair exchanges.
The American anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his colleagues presented a set of bargaining
games to adults living in different small-scale societies across the globe. Though the subjects in this study
played a number of different games, the basic goal was similar to those deployed by Fehr in his studies of
children and adults: under what conditions will individuals choose to share an equal as opposed to an
unequal distribution of resources?
Consider the ultimatum game. One individual decides how to distribute a fixed amount of money
to an anonymous partner; in the Henrich games, he always used the local currency and an amount that
was appropriate for the society. The partner had two options: keep what is on offer or reject it. Rejection
is costly to both players as they leave empty handed. Rejection is both an expression of sour grapes for
what could have been ⎯⎯ a fair offer ⎯⎯ and punishment for selfish behavior. In large scale societies,
offers typically range from 40-50% of the initial pot, and rejections are common for offers less than about
20%.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 71
Across the globe, most people in these small scale societies offered some amount of the initial
pot. Across the globe, most people rejected really low offers. This shows the universal signature of
fairness: an expectation of sharing resources and a no-tolerance view of greed. Cultures differed with
respect to how much they shared and whether they rejected. Some societies offered, on average, close to
40%, while others offered as little as 15%. Some societies accepted virtually all offers, whereas others
rejected both low and even high offers. Even in more egalitarian societies, therefore, there is sensitivity to
unequal distributions. Even in egalitarian societies, there is a willingness to punish those who act
unfairly, greedily taking more than their fair share.
The work I have discussed on fairness is only a fraction of the growing body of scientific
evidence. What this research reveals is that a sense of fairness is part of human nature, appearing early in
development, but guided by experience toward a particular cultural form. When our desire for fairness or
equity combines with our competitive drive, envy often follows. Studies of the brain show how envy is
generated from this combination.
When healthy subjects sit in a brain scanner and learn about other individuals who have what they
desire, there is considerable activity in the anterior cingulate, and more activity in those who feel more
envious. This is not the envy center of the brain. There is no such area. But the recruitment of the anterior
cingulate in other social situations helps us understand what is going on more generally in the case of
envy. The anterior cingulate activates when we experience pain from social exclusion, but not when we
witness such pain in others. It is one of the areas that was activated in Chiao’s work on the differences in
pain empathy for those supporting either an egalitarian or hierarchical society. The anterior cingulate is
also involved when our minds are pulled in two different directions, a situation that arises when we are
forced to choose between two conflicting moral options ⎯⎯ for example, a duty to save the lives of many
versus the prohibition of killing one person to save the lives of many. There is a common thread here that
unites these different experiences. Like our experience of social exclusion, envy is also a form of social
pain and to some, deeply painful, as it reveals a sense of deficiency in acquiring resources. Envy also
represents a situation in which our positive sense of self conflicts with the negative sense of self
engendered by social comparison. Our brain ⎯⎯ and the anterior cingulate in particular ⎯⎯ informs us that
we are less accomplished when compared with others. Envy is socially imposed pain generated by
comparison shopping.
Envy highlights what we don’t have, which fuels the system of desire, which seeks satisfaction.
Unsatisfied, envy runs wild. Unsatisfied, wanting keeps hunting for pleasure. Schadenfreude delivers
some prey.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 72
O Schadenfreude
On February 15, 1978, a relatively unknown boxer with few professional fights, stepped into the Las
Vegas boxing ring and snatched the world heavyweight champion title from Muhammad Ali. Ali, along
with his entourage of managers, coaches and fans were shocked, though no one denied that he lost. The
unknown boxer was Leon Spinks. His only prior claim to fame, and ticket to a shot at Ali, was an
Olympic gold medal two years earlier. With this win, not only did Spinks enjoy the heavyweight belt of
champions, but a cash prize of $350,000 and a promise of $3.8 million for the rematch with Ali. But this
meteoric rise to the top fizzled into a meteoric crash, driven by women, alcohol, sports cars, and a lack of
training. Leon Spinks, aka “Neon Leon,” was living the fast life, and rapidly losing his status as a
respected sports hero.
Moments before his rematch with Ali, he cruised the streets of New Orleans on top of a limousine
while smoking a joint. He was flaunting his nonchalance, making fun of Ali’s age, and carrying on about
his ability to take the old champ without a single work out. When he entered the ring, Ali was ready.
Though the match went the full fifteen rounds, it was no contest. Ali won.
Newspaper writers and boxing fans celebrated the return of their champion, and mocked the
downfall of an ephemeral, arrogant, and out of control hero. After losing to Ali in the rematch, Neon
Leon crashed further, losing all of his earnings, taking on odd jobs for minimum wage, losing a son in a
gang fight, and suffering defeat after defeat in the boxing arena. From envied millionaire sports star to
bankrupt fool and the laughingstock of the boxing world.
When the envied fall down, we perversely enjoy the knock out. This is schadenfreude, a German
word that describes the joy we feel in witnessing another’s misfortune. Though the emotion is universally
understood, recognized in our written records at least as far back as Aristotle, the German language is one
of the few to capture the feeling by tapping the brain’s promiscuity, combining the word for harm
(schaden) with the word for joy (freude). Like envy, schadenfreude is a social, comparative emotion. It
erupts when those we envy fall down, when someone we dislike meets his comeuppance, and when a
misfortune is deserved. But like envy, schadenfreude presents two faces, one elevating and virtuous, the
other deflating and divisive. We should feel good when a person is caught crossing a moral line,
committing an injustice. Such feelings not only reinforce our own adherence to moral norms, but
encourage us to punish those who transgress. Such feelings instill courage in the service of expressing
moral outrage. As Robert F. Kennedy stated “Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle
or intelligence.” Schadenfreude in this positive sense is the inner voice of moral courage. At the same
time, it can also be the inner voice of moral disengagement, providing justification for an observed harm.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 73
When this happens, our promiscuous brain has worked its combinatorial magic, causing us to feel good
when we witness someone else’s misfortune.
Schadenfreude, like envy, causes us to self-evaluate, looking inside of ourselves to assess our net
worth relative to others. We know from a large body of studies, several carried out by the American
social psychologist Roy Baumeister, that when an individual’s sense of self-worth is threatened,
especially those individuals with more narcissistic and overly confident personalities, aggression often
follows. The more personally threatened we feel, the more pleasure we should feel when someone else
suffers. The Dutch psychologist Wilco van Dijk tested this idea with two simple experiments. In both
experiments, subjects filled out a questionnaire that they believed evaluated their intellectual strengths.
Upon completion and scoring of the questionnaire, some were told that they had utterly flopped, scoring
in the lowest 10% of all subjects, while others were told that they performed brilliantly, scoring in the
upper 10%. Next, all subjects read a scenario in which someone suffers a misfortune. For example, in one
scenario, a student rents an expensive car to show off at a party, but then drives the car into a river, not
only damaging the car but requiring the fire department to tow it out. Those whose sense of self-worth
was threatened by the abominable test score were more likely to say that they felt good about the
misfortune, including smirks and laughter in response to the show off who submerged his rented car.
These results powerfully show that schadenfreude serves the beneficial function of hoisting our own selfworth.
When our self-worth has been challenged, for whatever reason, we feel better knowing that
someone else is worse off, regardless of context or direct relevance.
Our desire to see others suffer so that we may feel better can escalate to absurd levels, especially
when it is fueled by ideology. Beliefs can blind us to the cost-benefit analysis, motivating us to see harm
done to those outside of our inner sanctum even if it hurts us as well. Religious and political ideologies
are two of the hotspots that can drive entirely irrational desires and absurd attributions.
The American psychologist Richard Smith explored whether an individual’s political convictions
influenced the intensity of schadenfreude when witnessing a member of another party suffer, including
cases where society at large also suffers. Smith initiated the study prior to the US Presidential elections in
2004 involving Republican George W. Bush and Democrat John Kerry; during this period, the
Republicans controlled both executive branches of the government. Each subject ⎯⎯ all college
undergraduates ⎯⎯ provided information about party affiliation and strength of support for the policies
and beliefs of their party. Next, every subject read and provided reactions to short newspaper articles
describing tragicomic moments for the two candidates, one in which Bush fell off his bicycle while
riding, and the other involving Kerry wearing a bizarre space outfit during a visit to NASA. Last,
subjects read and reacted to an article describing job losses and the economic downturn facing the nation
⎯⎯ an article meant to capture an objective cost to all members of society, irrespective of party affiliation.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 74
Unsurprisingly, Democrats expressed more pleasure from reading about Bush’s bicycle accident,
whereas Republicans were more joyful over Kerry’s bizarre space suit. Surprisingly, Democrats also
expressed pleasure from reading about the economic downturn, and more pleasure than the Republicans
who were more likely to express negative feelings about this situation. Thus, despite the fact that the
economic downturn hurt everyone, the Democrats expressed pleasure over the added damage this
inflicted on the Republicans ⎯⎯ who they held responsible ⎯⎯ and conversely, the added benefit it
brought to the Democrats who could wag their fingers.
In a second study, Smith found that Democrats experienced more schadenfreude than
Republicans over the number of casualties reported out of the Iraq war, even though Iraqis were certainly
not preferentially targeting Republicans. The pleasure they experienced was entirely driven by the fact
that this was a war sponsored by a Republican government, and thus, the fatalities could be blamed on the
Republicans. From a Democrat’s perspective, even though everyone loses when soldiers die in war, it is a
bigger loss for Republicans, and thus, a bigger gain for Democrats. With schadenfreude, it is all about
comparative shopping. It is all about satisfying our desires relative to others.
As noted above, schadenfreude appears to emerge strongly when an individual’s misfortune is
deserved. To explore what is happening in the brain when such pleasure is experienced, and the
situations that might trigger it, the German cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer set up a study involving
healthy men and women. In the first phase, subjects played a bargaining game for money against an
unfamiliar partner; prior to the game, and unbeknownst to the subject, Singer set things up so that the
partner played either fairly or unfairly. After the game, each subject entered a scanner, and watched their
partner receive a painful shock to the hand.
Predictably, Singer discovered that both men and women liked the fair players better than the
unfair players, and showed more empathy to fair players when they were shocked. Proof of empathy was
read off the images of brain activation, especially the brain circuitry known to be involved in pain
empathy, and mentioned earlier in my discussion of Joan Chiao’s work on social hierarchies: the insula
and anterior cingulate. Unpredictably, Singer discovered that the level of activity in this pain empathy
circuitry was reduced when men ⎯⎯ but not women ⎯⎯ saw unfair players receive pain. She also observed
that in men ⎯⎯ but not women ⎯⎯ there was increased activity in the nucleus accumbens ⎯⎯ an area
mentioned earlier on that, in rats, monkeys and humans is consistently associated with the experience of
reward and liking. The more individual men desired revenge for an unfair offer, the more activity they
showed in this reward area.
Singer’s findings are joined by many others showing that the nucleus accumbens, together with
other reward areas, are activated in a wide variety of situations in which we gain from others’ pain. But
because these same areas also respond to non-social, non-comparative experiences, such as eating, we
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 75
come back to a critical point in this chapter: areas that evolved for one function are readily recruited for
others, especially in a promiscuous brain like ours. As long as something makes us feel good, whether it
is winning, eating, social comparison, or harming another, the reward areas of the brain turn on.
Schadenfreude is one of the mind’s ambassadors, enabling us to journey from a state of inferiority
to superiority. It enables “imaginary revenge” in the words of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Like envy, it is highly adaptive, focusing our attention on inequities. Like envy, it is also maladaptive,
rewarding us when the inequity is not only addressed, but results in another’s failure and misery. If failure
is associated with violence, including death, so be it. The brain is poised to inspire our desire to harm or
witness harm in order to feel good.
An appetite for violence
Billions of people, perhaps all humans, have had vivid fantasies about sex, violence, or sexual violence.
Are these fantasies like food fantasies, cravings that need to be satisfied? Or, as some theories would have
it, are sexual and violent fantasies satisfying on their own, playing a cathartic role, releasing energy and
thus, reducing the need to act out?
Seung-Hui Cho was born in South Korea and then moved to the United States with his parents.
During his first three years in college, both students and professors in his literature and theatre courses
described his writings as disturbing and disgusting, and his actions toward other students as ominous and
frightening. One professor noted that his creative pieces “seemed very angry,” while another demanded
that he be removed from the class. A classmate noted that his plays were “really morbid and grotesque…I
remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play, the boy threw a
chainsaw around and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father
with a Rice Krispy treat.” Cho was advised to seek counseling. He didn’t. No one followed up. A
professor aware of his often inappropriate comments and behavior contacted members of the
administration. No response. Several women alerted the campus police after Cho stalked them. No
disciplinary action was taken despite his repeated offenses. As in the SEC’s tin ear to the alarms
surrounding Madoff’s dubious securities, so too was everyone at Cho’s university deaf to his alarming
behavior in class and out.
During his senior year, Cho wrote an essay describing his anger toward rich kids, the unfairness
of life, and his own misery. He also described a revenge fantasy, packed with images of retaliation
toward those who had what he lacked. He sent his reflections along with excessively violent photographs
and videotapes to the New York headquarters of NBC news. Under a photograph of bullets he provided
the caption “All the [shit] you've given me, right back at you with hollow points."
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 76
On April 16, 2007, Cho dressed up in army fatigues. He left his dormitory and killed 32 people
and wounded 25 others with a semi-automatic Glock 19 pistol filled with hollow-point bullets, designed
to cause more tissue damage than traditional bullets. Cho then shot himself in the temple, ending his life
and the Virginia Tech massacre.
Cho’s case provides a horrifying example of how fantasies of violence can lead to real life
enactments and a trail of blood. It also provides a counter-example of the catharsis view: Cho’s fantasies
about violent revenge did not make him feel better. It made him feel worse and more violent ⎯⎯ a pattern
supported by dozens of studies.
Normally raised children as young as seven years old are more likely to act aggressively toward
their peers if they are self-absorbed in a world of aggressive fantasy, and this is especially the case for
children who witnessed violence or were subjected to it. Adult men and women are more likely to crave
violence after reading an argument in favor of the cathartic magic of violent fantasies than after reading a
manifesto against catharsis. Men who engage in aggressive sexual fantasies are more likely to engage in
aggression, but only if they are narcissists. Men who engage in deviant sexual fantasies are more likely to
enact these fantasies, but only if they exhibit signs of psychopathy. Psychopathy and narcissism are like
Siamese twins, inseparable. What these studies show is that those who are self-absorbed and play with
violent or sexual fantasies, are most likely to take these imaginary worlds onto the real world stage.
Further evidence of the connection between violent fantasies and violent actions comes from
studies by the German psychologist Thomas Elbert who studied child soldiers brainwashed into joining
the ranks of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Northern Uganda’s rebel group. Since its inception in 1987, the
LRA has recruited 25-65,000 children, starting with boys and girls as young as 10-12 years old. In
detailed interviews and analyses of now retired child soldiers, Elbert discovered that those who had more
experience with killing developed stronger, appetite-driven fantasies of killing, a hunger that had to be
fulfilled by real killing. As one ex-child soldier noted “The more we killed, the more we acquired a taste
for it. If you are allowed to act out this lust it will never let you go again. You could see the lust in our
greed popping eyes. [...] It was an unprecedented pleasure for everyone.” Not only was fantasy converted
into killing, but the more they killed, the less they experienced any trauma in later life. Unlike the droves
of veterans who have been returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder or PTSD, these child soldiers developed an immunity. Many of the veterans from Iraq and
Afghanistan had no interest in killing, and deemed the war unnecessary. In contrast, these child soldiers
were brain washed into believing that killing was necessary, and a sign of importance. Killing that is
justified is rewarding, whether the justification is real or the product of self-deception. When selfdeception
joins the fray ⎯⎯ as I further develop in chapter 3 ⎯⎯ killing is not only rewarding but virtuous.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 77
Cho’s case is not the exception, but the rule: persistent fantasies, whether sexual, violent, or
sexually violent, are often played out in real life. When people voice their fantasies, we should open our
ears. When therapists, especially those influenced by the catharsis view of the mind, encourage their
patients to engage in aggressive fantasies to release their pent up energy, we should bring forward
malpractice suits as they are accomplices to crime.
What kind of mind is most likely to rev up the fantasy world to supersonic levels and then
unleash it in the service of excessive harm? Lust murderers ⎯⎯ individuals with a craving for the bizarre and
degenerate ⎯⎯provide one answer to this question. Lust murderers are typically repeat offenders or serial
killers. The serial nature of their crimes comes from the fact that they are motivated by recurrent
fantasies that create recurrent cravings. They are, effectively, addicted to violence. Their fantasies often
entail some kind of paraphilia ⎯⎯ an extreme and abnormal sexual arousal to objects, people or situations
⎯⎯ played out through some form of sadism ⎯⎯ a persistent pattern of sexual or non-sexual pleasure from
humiliating, punishing and harming others. Here again we see the promiscuous human mind at work,
seamlessly blending pleasure and violence, animate and inanimate attractions, sometimes with benign
origins, but often with malignant outcomes. Thus, the pleasure derived from humiliation may develop out
of the more common, normal and less harmful pleasure we experience from mockery and humor.
Humiliation is just a small step away in a mind that derives joy from others’ demise.
The paraphilias, like many of the other disorders that appear within the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Health, fall along a continuum from rather benign forms of voyeurism to
erotophonophilia, the vicious and sadistic killing of an innocent victim in order to achieve ultimate sexual
satisfaction. Regardless of the particular object or situation driving the paraphilia, individuals become
addicted. Like other addictions, including those associated with food, drugs, and alcohol, paraphilic
addicts experience withdrawal. Dangerously for the world around them, the erotophonophilic or lust killer
harbors sadistic paraphilias, including flagellation ⎯⎯ the need to club, whip or beat someone ⎯⎯
anthropophagy ⎯⎯ the desire to eat human body parts ⎯⎯ picquerism ⎯⎯ a craving to stab someone or cut
off their flesh, focusing especially on genitals and breasts ⎯⎯ and necrosadism ⎯⎯ a yearning to have
sexual contact with the dead. Although these desires may seem unimaginable, they reveal one facet of the
human mind’s potential ⎯⎯ a potential that was fully realized in the mind of Jeffrey Dahmer who
flagellated, cannibalized, dismembered, and engaged in necrophilia with his 17 victims. Such disordered
minds are part of the human condition, one that stretches from individuals who never cache in on their
fantasies to those who not only deliver, but develop ⎯⎯ as in addictions to food and drugs ⎯⎯ deeper and
deeper desires for harming others without the rewards that come from such harm. When wanting and
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 78
liking part company, with liking falling dormant due to sensitization, wanting grows in intensity, seeking
but failing to find satisfaction. So begins an appetite for violence, one that can turn into a craving.
A craving to impress
Gazelles on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania sometimes move in an exceptionally bizarre way. With legs
rigidly extended, they bounce up and down like kangaroos. There is no obvious function associated with
this movement. If anything, it appears energetically wasteful. If these gazelles lived in tall grass, one
might think that the bouncing was designed to better see or be seen. But the Serengeti plains are flat and
the grass is short. Gazelles can see for miles in this habitat and so can everything else that shares this
gorgeous part of the planet with them. This includes the lions, leopards and cheetah that think of gazelles
as breakfast, lunch and dinner. Why would a gazelle advertise like this? Why alert predators to your
location and availability? Why not use the coloration of your fur to blend into the color scheme of the
savannah, moving swiftly but imperceptibly?
We can explain the gazelle’s bizarre movements ⎯⎯ called stotting ⎯⎯ by thinking economically,
using Zahavi’s honest signaling theory that I described in Chapter 1. Whenever evolutionary biologists
see a behavior that is costly, they immediately search for a potential benefit. The reason is simple:
behaviors that tax an individual's chances of survival and reproduction are ultimately weeded out by the
force of natural selection. There must be some benefit to the individual or to others in order to neutralize
the costs. Given the ostentatious nature of the gazelle’s stotting, who benefits and how? Since the
behavior is eye-poppingly interesting to human observers, one assumes that it is eye-popping to other
animals on the Serengeti plains as well. Gazelles typically stot when they detect danger which, in the
Serengeti, means leopards, lions and cheetah. If gazelles stot to alert other gazelles, then most gazelles
should stot, at least some of the time. This is because all gazelles are vigilant, should have multiple
opportunities to see these predatory cats, and should benefit from an alarm signal. But this is not what we
observe. Instead, stotting seems to be reserved for those in good shape. When gazelles stot, they appear to
be sending a cease and desist signal to any observant cat. If this is the gazelles’ message, then cats should
selectively chase non-stotters over stotters. And when cats turn a blind eye to stotting gazelles and chase
them, they should have less success than when they chase non-stotters. Stotters are turbo-charged.
Stotting is simply their way of showing off.
These expectations are supported by the British biologists Claire Fitzgibbon and Tim Caro who
spent hundreds of hours watching gazelles and predatory cats. What they reveal is that stotting is an
honest signal of condition or quality. Only gazelles in good condition can tolerate the costs of stotting.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 79
Stotting handicaps the individual, imposing a significant cost on the ability to move. But the cost paid is
relative to the individual’s condition. Without the cost and the ability to manage it, everyone could stot.
And if everyone could stot, the cats would quickly figure out how meaningless it is and look for other
cues to vulnerability.
Stotting appears excessive, but in fact is an honest signal of power. It is, to borrow a phrase from
the economist Thorstein Veblen, "conspicuous consumption." By flaunting their superior condition,
throwing away resources just because they can, these stotting gazelles benefit in the long run, living
longer and leaving more offspring who will inherit their qualities. These ideas carry over into human
behavior, from big spenders to, I suggest, big harmers.
The American anthropologist James Boone has suggested that human magnanimity evolved as
did stotting, as an honest signal of wealth and power. It represents a desire to impress through wastage.
Handicap yourself in the short run to benefit your wealth and status in the long run. Big tippers don't tip
in private, but in the presence of those who can admire their lavish tips. Hunter-gatherers who bring home
large prey from a day of hunting don't make cryptic deposits for others, but make sure that their offerings
are public. The Mayan pyramids were not built for personal enjoyment behind walled enclosures, but in
the open, visible to potential enemies as displays of excessive power to create something really big and
costly. Rappers such as JayZ, Puff Daddy, and 50 cent don't have absurdly lavish cribs with a six pack of
sports cars because this is what they like, but because this is what they can show off on MTV. Flaunting,
even at a substantial cost, provides a path to power. This is a club whose motto reads “Impress with
excess.”
My suggestion is that excessive harms work as honest signals of wealth and power. Here we
combine the HOW of evil ⎯⎯ discussed in this chapter ⎯⎯ with the WHY of evil ⎯⎯ discussed in chapter 1.
When millions are raped, slashed, burned, chopped up, gored, and dropped out of planes before dying,
there are only two possible explanations: the evildoer is clinically mad with no sense of moderation or a
healthy schemer who has allowed desire to run wild. The schemers are like stotting gazelles, wanting to
impress others of their awesome powers by performing high risk displays. The schemers deploy
proactive, premeditated, and cold violence ⎯⎯ like predators. As the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky noted in
his commentary on the Nazi concentration camps “Individuals demonstrated commitment by acting, on
their own initiative, with greater brutality than their orders called for. Thus excess did not spring from
mechanical obedience. On the contrary; its matrix was a group structure where it was expected that
members exceed the limits of normal violence.” Unfortunately for society ⎯⎯ past, present and future ⎯⎯
the Nazis are not an isolated case. When Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadic, and Ratko Mladic
launched their ethnic cleansing initiative, they didn’t just displace or kill Albanians and Croatians, they
raped their women, old and young, in front of husbands, fathers, and grandfathers ⎯⎯ and then killed man
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 80
of them. Admiral Luis Maria Mendia, one of the leaders in Argentina’s “Dirty war,” convinced victims to
board a plane under the pretext of a freedom flight, and then once in flight, were thrown out of the plane,
adding sheer terror to the brutality of their death. Accounts such as these litter the pages of history. They
reveal that the desire to impress with excess is part of human nature.
What we have learned in this chapter is that our biology hands us the tools for excess, and hands
some of us more than our fair share. This does not mean that we will or must use such tools. It also
doesn’t mean that the tools were designed for excess. Some are endowed with genes that predispose to
sensation-seeking and risk-taking, others to brain circuitry and chemistry that create an insatiable desire
for reward. Different environments either encourage this biology or discourage it, a topic that occupies
chapter 4. As the eighteenth century poet William Blake remarked “The road to excess leads to the palace
of wisdom… for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” To more
deeply understand how our desires runaway to excess, we need to understand how the mind facilitates this
process. We need to understand the role of denial. We need to understand how individuals and groups
dehumanize the other and self-deceive themselves into believing that those unlike them represent a threat
to their purity and power. We need to understand how desire and denial combine to pave the way to
excessive harms.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 81
Endnotes: Chapter 2
Recommended books
Bloom, P. (2010). How Pleasure Works. New York: W.W. Norton.
E. Staub (2010). Overcoming Evil. Oxford University Press.
Notes:
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June, pp. 1-20; Henriques, D.B. (2011). From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of
Fraud. New York Times, February, 1-3; J. Creswell & L. Thomas, New York Times, 1/24/2009
• Stimulating the brain: Berridge, K. C. (2009). Wanting and liking: Observations from the Neuroscience
and Psychology Laboratory. Inquiry, 52(4), 378-398; Kringelbach, M., & Berridge, K. C. (2009).
Towards a functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13,
479-487; Kringelbach, M., & Berridge, K. C. (2010). The functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and
happiness. Discovery Medicine, 9(49), 579-587; Olds, J. (1956) Pleasure centers in the brain. Sci
Am, 195:105–16; Olds J & Milner P. (1954) Positive reinforcement produced by electrical
stimulation of the septal area and other regions of rat brain. J Comp Physiol Psychol 47:419–27.
Portenoy, R. K., Jarden, J. O., Sidtis, J. J., Lipton, R. B., Foley, K. M., & Rottenberg, D. A. (1986).
Compulsive thalamic self-stimulation: a case with metabolic, electrophysiologic and behavioral
correlates. [Case Report]. Pain, 27(3), 277-290.
• Wanting, learning and liking: Peciña S, Cagniard B, Berridge KC, Aldridge JW, Zhuang X. 2003.
Hyperdopaminergic mutant mice have higher “wanting” but not “liking” for sweet rewards. J
Neurosci 23:9395–402; Peciña, S., Smith, K. S., & Berridge, K. C. (2006). Hedonic hot spots in
the brain The Neuroscientist 12(6), 500–511.
• Dopamine in and out of control: Chen, T., Blum, K., Mathews, D., & Fisher, L. (2005). Are
dopaminergic genes involved in a predisposition to pathological aggression?:: Hypothesizing the
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system and addiction: what dopamine does and doesn't do. Current Opinion in Pharmacology, 7, 69–
76; Doya, K. (2008). Modulators of decision making. Nature Neuroscience, 11(4), 410–416; Dreher,
J.-C., Kohn, P., Kolachana, B., Weinberger, D. R., & Berman, K. F. (2009). Variation in dopamine
genes influences responsivity of the human reward system. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 106(2), 617–622; Everitt, B. J., Belin, D., Economidou, D., Pelloux, Y., Dalley, J. W., &
Robbins, T. W. (2008). Review. Neural mechanisms underlying the vulnerability to develop
compulsive drug-seeking habits and addiction Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, 363(1507), 3125–3135; Everitt, B. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2005). Neural systems
of reinforcement for drug addiction: from actions to habits to compulsion Nature Neuroscience,
8(11), 1481–1489; Grigorenko, E. L., De Young, C. G., Eastman, M., Getchell, M., Haeffel, G. J.,
Klinteberg, B. A., Koposov, R. A., et al. (2010). Aggressive behavior, related conduct problems, and
variation in genes affecting dopamine turnover. Aggressive Behavior, 36(3), 158–176; Johnson, P.
M., & Kenny, P. J. (2031). Dopamine D2 receptors in addiction-like reward dysfunction and
compulsive eating in obese rats. Nature Publishing Group, 13(5), 635–641; Sabbatini da Silva Lobo,
D., Vallada, H., & Knight, J. (2007). Dopamine genes and pathological gambling in discordant sib-
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pairs. Journal of Gambling Studies, 23, 421–433; Sharot, T., Shiner, T., Brown, A. C., Fan, J., &
Dolan, R. J. (2009). Dopamine Enhances Expectation of Pleasure in Humans. Current Biology,
19(24), 2077–2080; Volkow, N. D., Wang, G.-J., & Baler, R. D. (2011). Reward, dopamine and the
control of food intake: implications for obesity Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 37–46; Walter,
N., Markett, S., & Montag, C. (2010). A genetic contribution to cooperation: Dopamine-relevant
genes are associated with social facilitation. Social Neuroscience 6: 289-301.
• Desire for dominance: Boksem, M. A. S., Kostermans, E., Milivojevic, B., & De Cremer, D. (2011).
Social status determines how we monitor and evaluate our performance. Social Cognitive and
Affective Neuroscience; Chiao, J. Y. (2010). Neural basis of social status hierarchy across species.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 20(6), 803–809. Elsevier Ltd; Chiao, J. Y., Mathur, V. A., Harada,
T., & Lipke, T. (2009). Neural Basis of Preference for Human Social Hierarchy versus
Egalitarianism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167(1), 174–181; Deaner, R. O.,
Khera, A. V., & Platt, Michael L. (2005). Monkeys pay per view: adaptive valuation of social images
by rhesus macaques Current Biology, 15(6), 543–548; Klein, J. T., Deaner, R. O., & Platt, Michael L.
(2008). Neural correlates of social target value in macaque parietal cortex Current Biology, 18(6),
419–424; Liew, S., Ma, Y., & Han, S. (2011). PLoS ONE: Who's afraid of the boss: Cultural
differences in social hierarchies modulate self-face recognition in Chinese and Americans. PLoS
ONE, 6(2), 1–8; PLoS ONE, 4(5), 1–8; Watson, K. K., & Platt, M L. (2008). Neuroethology of
reward and decision making. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,
363(1511), 3825–3835.
•Envy and schadenfreude: Almas, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sorensen, E. O., & Tungodden, B. (2010).
Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance. Science (New York, NY), 328(5982),
1176–1178; Blake, P. R., & Mcauliffe, K. (2011). “I had so much it didn't seem fair”: Eight-yearolds
reject two forms of inequity. Cognition, 120(2), 215–224; Combs, D. J. Y., Powell, C. A. J.,
Schurtz, D. R., & Smith, R. H. (2009). Politics, schadenfreude, and ingroup identification: The
sometimes happy thing about a poor economy and death. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 45(4), 635–646; Dvash, J, Gilam, G, Ben-Ze'ev, A, Hendler, T, & Shamay-Tsoory,
S.G. (2010). The envious brain: The neural basis of social comparison. Human Brain Mapping.
31(11): 1741-1750; Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young
children Nature, 454(7208), 1079–1083; Leach, C.W., & Spears, R. (2008). A vengefulness of
the impotent: the pain of in-group inferiority and schadenfreude toward successful out-groups. J
Pers Soc Psychol, 95(6), 1383-1396; Shamay-Tsoory, S.G., Fischer, M., Dvash, J., Harari, H.,
Perach-Bloom, N. & Levkovitz, Y. (2009). Intranasal administration of oxytocin increases envy
and schadenfreude (gloating). Biol Psychiatry, 66(9), 864-870; Shamay-Tsoory, S.G, Tibi-
Elhanany, Y, & Aharon-Peretz, J. (2007). The green-eyed monster and malicious joy: 
the
neuroanatomical bases of envy and 
gloating (schadenfreude) Brain, 130, 1663-1678; Takahashi,
H, Kato, M, Matsuura, M, Mobbs, D, Suhara, T, & Okubo, Y. (2009). When Your Gain Is My
Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude. Science, 323,
937-939; van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: the
experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419-429; van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg,
M., & Pieters, R. (2010). Warding Off the Evil Eye: When the fear of being envied increases
prosocial behavior. Psychological Science, 21(11): 1671-1677; Van Dijk, W.W. Ouwerkerk,
J.W., Goslinga, S., Nieweg, M., & Gallucci, M. (2006). When people fall from grace:
reconsidering the role of envy in Schadenfreude. Emotion, 6(1), 156-160; Van Dijk, W. W.,
Ouwerkerk, J. W., Wesseling, Y. M., & van Koningsbruggen, G. M. (2011). Towards
understanding pleasure at the misfortunes of others: the impact of self-evaluation threat on
schadenfreude Cognition and Emotion, 25(2), 360–368.
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 83
• Lustful violence: Gellerman, D.M, & Suddath, R. (2005). Violent fantasy, dangerousness, and the duty
to warn and protect. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, 33, 484-495; V.J.
Gerberth. (1998). Anatomy of a lust murder. Law and Order Magazine, 46 (5), pp. 1-6; Gray, N,
Watt, A, & Hassan, S. (2003). Behavioral indicators of sadistic sexual murder predict the
presence of sadistic sexual fantasy in a normative sample. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 18,
1018-1034; Smith, C.E, Fischer, K.W, & Watson, M.W. (2009). Toward a refined view of
aggressive fantasy as a risk factor for aggression: interaction effects involving cognitive and
situational variables. Aggr. Behav., 35(4), 313-323; Crombach, A, Weierstall, R, Schalinski, I,
Hecker, T, Ovuga, E, & Elbert, T. (2010). Social status and the desire to resort to violence -- a
study on former child soldiers of Uganda. Aggr. Behav., 1-24; Elbert, Thomas, Weierstall,
Roland, & Schauer, Maggie. (2010). Fascination violence: on mind and brain of man hunters.
European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, 260 (Suppl 2), S100-S105; Ruf, M.,
Schauer, M., Neuner, F., Catani, C., Schauer, E., & Elbert, T. (2010). Narrative exposure therapy
for 7- to 16-year-olds: a randomized controlled trial with traumatized refugee children. J Trauma
Stress, 23(4), 437-445; Schaal, S., & Elbert, T. (2006). Ten years after the genocide: trauma
confrontation and posttraumatic stress in Rwandan adolescents. Journal of Traumatic Stress,,
19(1), 95-105; Weierstall, R, Schaal, S, Schalinski, I, Dusingizemungu, J, & Elbert, T. (2010).
The thrill of being violent as an antidote to posttraumatic stress disorder in Rwandese genocide
perpetrators. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1-30.
Quotes:
Child soldiers: cited in A. Crombach et al. (2010) Social status and the desire to resort to violence -- a
study on former child soldiers of Uganda. Aggressive Behavior pp. 1-24
The Nazis and excess: W. Sofsky (1993). The Order of Terror. Princeton University Press, New Jersey,
p.228
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 84
Chapter 3:
Ravages of denial
Self denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
-- George Bernard Shaw
In October of 1980, a 39 year old man walked into the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, having
suffered a gun shot to the left side of his skull. Once the medical team removed the bullet fragments and
cleared the blood clot, the man was able to speak. He had shot himself, aiming at his second head. Yes,
his second head. This man believed that he had two heads, his own and the head of his dead wife’s
gynecologist. Before his wife died in a car accident, he believed that she was having an affair with her
gynecologist. At night, the second head spoke, accompanied by voices from Jesus and Abraham who
confirmed the existence of the second head. As the patient expressed to the interviewing doctor “The
other head kept trying to dominate my normal head, and I would not let it. It kept trying to say to me I
would lose, and I said bull-shit.” “I am the king pin here” it said and it kept going on like that for about
three weeks and finally I got jack of it, and I decided to shoot my other head off.” Over a two year period,
the perception of the second head disappeared. The attending neuropsychologist, David Ames, described
the case as an example of schizophrenia-induced delusional bicephaly ⎯⎯ a distortion of reality that
creates a false belief of two heads.
Cases like this are bizarre. But like many neuropsychological reports, they force us to reevaluate
our perception of reality, what’s normal and what’s distorted, what’s adaptive and what’s maladaptive.
The Australian patient who developed delusional bicephaly was suffering from the loss of his wife. Loss
and suffering motivate explanation, along with something or someone to blame: Was it really an
accident? Why her? Why not me? What if she had stayed home that morning? What if I had been driving
with her? Was she distracted by her lover? Was he in the car? These questions represent gaps in a
narrative, holes that we attempt to fill, often by distorting reality.
Distortions of reality are common. Even the healthiest among us create stories designed to
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 85
explain a puzzle in our lives or to help us through trauma. These stories are narratives that provide new
truths by denying particular elements of reality. They represent the mind’s method of filling in gaps,
providing justifications for what we can’t explain or wish to explain in a different way. This is an
adaptive feature of the human mind, one that is uniquely human. But this same feature can be used to
justify immoral and atrocious behaviors, the kind that lead to excessive harms. When we distort reality
by treating others as non-human, perceiving and judging them as animals, parasites, or machines, we have
armed ourselves with a weapon that enables great harms by removing the moral consequences of our
actions. Animals, parasites and machines are outside of our moral concerns, so we shouldn’t feel guilty,
or wrack our conscience when we end their lives or ability to move. Animals, parasites and machines
don’t have rights, and thus, we have no obligation to them. Similarly, when we distort reality by means
of deception and self-deception, we have armed ourselves with weapons that enable desire to run wild.
Self-deception generates overconfidence. Overconfidence enables us to pursue our desire for power,
freed from the reins that pull us back, away from costly interactions. Self-deception allow us to convince
ourselves and deceive others that we are under attack, threatened by those who are unlike us. Under the
circumstances, we are justified in using self-defense, even if this leads to annihilating the enemy. Often,
self-deception combines with dehumanization to maximize the effectiveness of the distortion, paving an
unobstructed path for runaway desire. Denial enables desire to achieve satisfaction, minus the moral
conscience. These are the ideas that I will explore in this chapter.
Before discussing the scientific evidence that explains how the brain distorts reality by
dehumanizing and self-deceiving ⎯⎯ two core elements of denial ⎯⎯ we must understand how the brain
creates the reality of humanization, a process that imbues some things but not others with human qualities
and moral worth. This is an important problem as it shapes our perception of evil, who can cause
excessive harm and who can suffer from it. Rocks can cause great pain ⎯⎯ as in landslides ⎯⎯ but we
don’t hold them responsible for the harm caused because they lack intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires.
Rocks can also be crushed, pulverized into sand by humans working in a quarry. But rocks are neither
innocent nor victims as they have no moral worth, no capacity to suffer, and no ability to intentionally
harm another. If not rocks, what?
iHuman
Earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, children, and psychopaths can all cause harm to others, including
humans and other animals. We might be tempted to think that only psychopaths are rightfully classified
as evildoers because they are the only ones that can cause excessive harm to innocent others with harm as
a goal. But this begs the question of what we mean by excessive, innocent, and goal.
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 86
Earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, and some children often cause excessive harm to innocent
others, at least if the focus is on numbers and the way in which death arises. The earthquake that reached
a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale and demolished the capital of Haiti in 2010 took the lives of
approximately 200,000 people, all innocent and undeserving of this natural disaster. This is excess
beyond what any psychopath has ever achieved. The Spanish Flu found its way into the bodies of
innocent people from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands from 1918 to 1920, and killed over 50 million
people — a death toll that is at least four times higher than what Hitler caused during his reign, and
comparable to that achieved by Mao Ze-Dong during his. As noted in chapter 1, chimpanzees kill at a
rate that approximates many hunter-gatherer groups. When they kill, the frenzied attacks are over the top,
involving gruesome dismemberment of their victims by biting into the face, ripping off testicles and
dislocating limbs. By the age of 15 years, Willie James Bosket Jr had committed some 200 armed
robberies, stabbed 25 innocent victims, kicked a boy off of a roof to his death, and killed two men
following a failed robbery, all “for the experience.” At the level of outcomes, these are all horrific cases
of lives lost, with some excessive in terms of numbers and others in terms of means.
We can eliminate earthquakes and other natural disasters from the list of evildoers by noting that
they don’t have, as their goal or as a foreseen consequence, the elimination of lives, innocent or not. They
don’t have goals at all. This also eliminates them from the class of victims, assuming the day comes when
scientists can kill off earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, blizzards and so on before they pick up enough
steam to cause great harm. One might think that viruses, and their virulent partners the parasites, lack
goals because they lack brains. This intuition is correct anatomically, but incorrect conceptually. As the
American philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted, the beauty of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that
it provided a way of giving nature competence without comprehension. Thus, viruses and parasites have
goals without understanding at all. To survive and reproduce, they have evolved exquisite chemical and
electrical machines that harvest all of their host’s resources. And if making a living requires killing the
host, so be it. They do so without shedding a tear. No guilt, no remorse. Chimpanzees, on the other hand,
have goals and brains that represent them. When chimpanzees kill, their goal is not food. Their brutal
attacks are motivated by a desire to outcompete their rivals and absorb additional resources; no one
knows if they feel guilt or remorse. Willie Bosket’s goal was to rob two men, but when he failed, he
turned to gratuitous violence, for the experience. Bosket certainly could, as a human, feel guilt and
remorse, but all reports indicate he didn’t.
We can eliminate parasites and viruses from the list of evildoers and evilreceivers by noting that
they lack an understanding of right and wrong, and are incapable of suffering. Chimpanzees are a harder
case. They live in societies with norms and respond aggressively to norm transgressions, as occurs when a
high ranking male beats a lower ranking male for trying to steal food or a mating opportunity.
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 87
Chimpanzees also suffer, experiencing pain from both physical attacks and social loss. But getting angry
at something or someone and feeling pain from a physical or social assault are different from getting
angry because someone’s behavior was morally wrong, and suffering from a morally toxic action. I get
angry at my computer all the time, swearing when it crashes, and even smacking it on its backside. But
there is no moral harm. In this sense, there is no evidence that chimpanzees have a sense of right and
wrong, and that the pain they experience is linked to a sense of how one ought to behave. Chimpanzees
can’t be evildoers, but they certainly can, and have been evilrecipients.
There is also an important difference between violently harming another and knowing it is wrong,
and harming another because it is wrong. The latter fits at least one view of evil, a kind of radical evil in
which harm is created for harm’s sake, because it is rewarding. When Willie Bosket killed those two men,
he was certainly old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. He most likely killed
knowingly, perhaps for the generic experience of shooting someone, but perhaps not with a desire to harm
for harm’s sake. Then again, when he noted that he killed for the experience, perhaps this was the
experience of pleasure from harming another.
Was Willie Bosket responsible for his shootings? The answer to this question depends on how
we think about Bosket’s options, and the link between cause and effect. At the simplest level, Bosket
caused the death of the two men in the same way that a swinging wrecking ball can cause the death of two
men. But the wrecking ball can’t be held accountable or responsible in the same way that Bosket can.
Wrecking balls lack options and lack the capacity to predict the consequences of their actions. Bosket
had options, could foresee the consequences of his actions, and had the capacity to act upon his options.
Or did he?
We know that the frontal lobes of the brain play an important role in self-control and emotional
regulation. We also know that this area of the brain is not fully mature until people reach their midtwenties.
Bosket was, therefore, operating with an immature brain. His actions were, in some ways, like
the wrecking ball, driven by inertia. Perhaps the frustration of failing to achieve his goal — robbery —
caused a dizzying chemical reaction in his brain, causing a flood of emotions, blinding his capacity to
think rationally. Paraphrasing the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, these electrochemical storms in
Bosket’s brain caused him to deposit his conscience at the door. Like the husband who finds his wife in
bed with her lover and kills them both on the spot, Bosket committed a crime of passion. On this account,
not only is he not evil, he is pardonable.
Immaturity is a mitigating factor when we evaluate a crime. It is why, in many countries, there is
one legal system for youths and another for adults. It is why, in countries with the death penalty, such as
the United States, youths are immune. With maturity comes a heightened capacity to control ones
actions, or at least, to gain better self-control and thus, to take responsibility for what one does. This
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 88
means that maturation eventually legitimizes individuals as potential evildoers. It does not, however,
cause a shift in our sense of evilrecipients. Willie Bosket may not have been an evildoer, but he certainly
could have been an evilrecipient.
What about psychopaths, people like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy? Pop culture tells us that
they are depraved, heinous, immoral monsters, deliberately causing harm to others, and often with a
delicious twinkle in their eye. But what if I told you that several recent studies of psychopaths indicate
that they know the difference between right and wrong? When judging the moral permissibility of
different actions, such as harming one person to save the lives of many, psychopaths’ judgments are often
like yours and mine, nuanced, varying depending upon the outcomes and the means by which they are
achieved. This is a rational, albeit largely unconscious understanding of right and wrong. This makes
psychopaths nothing like earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, or young children. It also means that they
don’t have bad moral principles, but rather, ones that are like yours and mine. What if I further told you
that before they develop into fully licensed-to-kill or extort psychopaths, many have an early history of
torturing pets and bullying other kids. What if I further told you that when they cooked the cat in the
microwave or bloodied little Johnny’s face with their fist, that the consequences of their actions left them
cold ⎯⎯ no guilt, remorse, or shame. Nothing. And what if I told you that these people are born with a
different brain chemistry and structure than you or I, leading to poor self-control and an emotionally
callous view of the world? If this medical report is correct, and I believe the scientific evidence supports
it, then psychopaths lack the ability to see alternative options and act on them. They also lack the
resources for self-control. Given this evidence, psychopaths are not evil at all, though the consequences
of their actions are often excessively heinous. Given this evidence, not one member of our initial list
would count as evildoers, though chimpanzees, children and psychopaths would all count as potential
evilrecipients.
What this discussion highlights is that our perception of evildoers and evilrecipients is influenced
by our sense of what it means to be human. Though evildoers and evilreceivers overlap in their capacities
to think and feel, there are differences, captured by Aristotle’s distinction between moral agents ⎯⎯ those
who have responsibility for others well being ⎯⎯and moral patients ⎯⎯ those who deserve moral
consideration and care from moral agents. The distinction gains scientific credibility thanks to a set of
studies by the American psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner. In one experiment, a large internet
population compared the qualities of different things, including humans at different stages of
development ⎯⎯ fetus, baby, child, and adult ⎯⎯ an adult human in a vegetative state, a dead human,
nonhuman animals ⎯⎯ frog, pet dog, chimpanzee ⎯⎯ God, and a socially savvy robot. Subjects judged
different pairings of these things on a wide range of dimensions, including which was more likely to
develop a unique personality, feel embarrassed, suffer pain, distinguish right from wrong, experience
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 89
conscious awareness, exert greater self-control, plan ahead, develop fears, feel pleasure, and erupt into
rage. Subjects also provided their personal opinions on which individual, within the pair, they liked most,
wanted to make happy or destroy, was most deserving of punishment, and most likely had a soul.
I assume that everyone reading about the design of this study has already formed an opinion
about some of the comparisons. Presumably everyone believes that a living adult is more consciously
aware than a dead person, fetus, dog, and robot. Presumably everyone believes that all animals feel more
pain than a dead human or a robot. And presumably everyone would rather make a dog happy than a
frog, and would be more likely to allocate souls to fetuses, babies, and adult humans than to robots and
frogs. But are we more conscious than God? Does a chimpanzee feel more embarrassed than a baby? Can
a person in a vegetative state feel more pleasure than a frog or robot? What dimensions, if any, cause us
to lasso some things together but not others? What things cluster together and why? As a reminder: this
study is about our intuitions, not about what scientists have discovered about the minds and emotions of
these different things.
Adding up the large set of responses produced a map or landscape defined by two dimensions:
experience and agency. Experience included properties such as hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, rage, desire,
consciousness, pride, embarrassment, and joy. Agency included self-control, morality, memory, emotion
recognition, planning, communication and thinking. Experience aligned with feelings, agency with
thinking. With these dimensions, we find God at one edge, high in agency and low in experience. On the
opposite side, huddled together on the landscape, defined by low agency and high experience, we find
fetuses, frogs, and people in a vegetative state. High in both agency and experience were adult men and
women. Robots and dead people were low on experience and in the middle for agency, whereas dogs,
chimpanzees, and human kids were high on experience and middling on agency. This landscape not only
helps us understand how people classify these different entities, but also plays a more active role in
guiding individuals’ judgments to punish, provide pleasure, and avoid harm. If you have to harm
something, pick an entity low in experience, such as dead people and robots who can’t suffer. If you have
to punish something, pick an entity high in agency, such as living adults who recognize the difference
between right and wrong and have the capacity for self-control.
What this work shows is that people have strong intuitions about which things are morally
responsible as agents and which are deserving of our moral concerns as patients. Moral patients are high
in experience, and can thus suffer as victims, innocent or not. This is why many countries have created
laws against harming nonhuman animals, including restrictions on which animals can serve in laboratory
experiments, what can be done to them, and how they should be housed. This is also why we don’t do
experiments on fetuses, newborns, adults in a vegetative state, or humans with neurological disorders that
knock out aspects of their experience and agency. Once something enters the arena of moral patients, we
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 90
tend to leave them within this arena even if they lose particular capacities. Conversely, if scientists
discover that an organism outside the arena of moral patient-hood has capacities of experience and agency
that are on a par with those inside the arena, this evidence often promotes their legal status and protection.
Such was the fate of the octopus, an invertebrate once classified by Aristotle as “stupid”, but now
elevated to the company of much smarter animals that solve novel problems, deploy trickery, and show
some evidence of being aware of their behavior. As such, they are one of the few invertebrates to enjoy
heightened protection and care when they are kept in captivity.
Moral agents are high in agency, meaning that they can distinguish right from wrong, exert selfcontrol
in the context of selfish temptation, can be blamed and punished, and are expected to care for
moral patients. Moral patients are high in experience, including especially the capacity to feel pain. Both
moral agents and patients have moral worth. But as in all entities that have worth or value, some are more
valuable than others. So it is with moral worth. This is where departures from humanness get interesting,
dangerously so. When we strip individuals of their moral worth, denying them qualities that define
humanness, we have entered a world of distortion and denial that facilitates and justifies excessive harms.
Across many studies, individuals consider themselves to be more human ⎯⎯ as defined by the
dimensions of experience and agency ⎯⎯ and to have greater moral worth than other individuals. When
individuals are socially ostracized and excluded from a group, they judge themselves as less human, and
so do the spectators who observe the ostracism. Individuals judge members of their own group to be more
human and morally worthy than those outside the group, no matter how small or broad the group is. What
counts is our overall sense of how we compare to others, and the dimensions used to calibrate this
similarity metric. The Australian social psychologist Nick Haslam carried out several experiments to
determine how our rating of a group’s humanness influenced how much we praise, blame and protect
them, as well as whether we believe that rehabilitation or punishment is most appropriate after they have
done something wrong. Haslam based his study on the idea, supported by the law, science, and our folk
intuitions that we blame, praise and punish only those who do bad things on purpose as opposed to by
accident. Conversely, we favor rehabilitation in those cases where we believe that the person can right a
wrong, learning a lesson from a prior transgression.
Subjects started by rating several different social groups along different dimensions of
humanness. Though Haslam’s dimensions were slightly different from those used by Gray and Wegner,
they generally corresponded to experience and agency, including compassion, warmth and a sense of
community on the one hand, and reason, self-control, civility, and refinement on the other. The target
social groups were associated with negative or positive stereotypes such as the homeless, mentally
disabled, athletes, politicians, doctors, lawyers, gays, and different religious groups. Next subjects
imagined that a member of one of these groups had acted morally or immorally, or had been mistreated in
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 91
some way. Then they decided whether the person should be praised for a particular moral act such as
returning a wallet, considered responsible for an immoral act such as breaking a promise, helped out for
mistreatment such as being pushed out of line by a person in a hurry, and punished or rehabilitated for
wrongful behavior.
Haslam’s results generated a landscape of humanness very much like Gray and Wegner’s. Those
groups rated highly in terms of agency, were more likely to be blamed and punished. Those groups rated
high in experience were more likely to be praised, protected, and placed into rehabilitation. Those groups
perceived as more emotional, compassionate and warm ⎯⎯ components of experience ⎯⎯ were praised
more, whereas those perceived as more civil and rational ⎯⎯ components of agency ⎯⎯ were praised less.
Overall, the more a group tilts toward the experience end of the spectrum, the more we see them as moral
patients, deserving of our care and compassion. The more a group tilts toward the agency end of the
spectrum, the more we see them as moral agents, having responsibilities and duties to act morally.
Haslam’s findings are not only of great conceptual interest, shaping our understanding of the
defining qualities of being human, but also figure into everyday political and legal decision making.
When do we believe a person has the right to vote, drive responsibly, drink alcohol reasonably, and serve
an adult as opposed to a youth sentence for a crime? In the United States, the age cut off for considering
the punishment of a crime under the jurisdiction of a juvenile court proceeding ranges from 16-19 years.
Juvenile sentences are lighter than adult sentences, and rarely include life in prison or the death penalty.
Though there is an arbitrariness to these age cut offs, and no good reason why states should differ, the
decision to treat youths differently not only maps on to our intuitions but to the attributes that
psychologists such as Haslam, Gray and Wegner have discovered. Treating an individual as a youth is
more likely to trigger the dimension of experience in jury members and thus, more likely to trigger a
sense that the individual should be protected and given the opportunity to change through rehabilitation.
This fits with scientific evidence that an immature brain is a more plastic brain, capable of change. It also
fits with the evidence that an immature brain is a brain with less self-control and critical reasoning ⎯⎯
both components of the agency dimension. These less than fully human qualities on the agency
dimension, balanced by more qualities on the experience dimension, provide youths with an automatic
entry ticket into the arena of moral patients.
Moving outside of the arena of moral patienthood and into that of moral agency requires a change
in perception. It requires us to see individuals as acting responsibly, controlling temptation, and
understanding the distinction between right and wrong. It is for these reasons that our legal system, and
the courts that carry out its principles, must consider psychological differences. Classifying individuals
as adults or juveniles drags with it a massive psychology that is biased toward responsibility, blame and
punishment on the one hand and protection, intervention, and rehabilitation on the other. The same biases
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 92
are also engaged when we consider adults with developmental disorders or brain injury, as these deficits
are often associated with selective loss of either components of agency or experience, and sometimes
both. As demonstrated by the work of Kurt Gray, Andres Martinez, and others, labeling someone a
psychopath, autistic, or schizophrenic effectively pigeon holes the individual into a class of individuals
with less than fully human qualities. This is a good thing when it focuses us on protection, intervention
and rehabilitation. It is a bad thing when it allows us to morally disengage because those lacking the full
compliment of qualities associated with agency and experience are less morally worthy. Humanness
drives our moral concerns and our sense of others’ moral worth. When we lower our sense of another’s
value, we are willing to violate our sense of the sacred, engaging in trade-offs that are normally taboo.
Experiments by the American psychologists Philip Tetlock and Jonathan Haidt help us see what
is sacred by asking individuals what they would pay to do something sacrilegious. If something is sacred,
of great moral worth either personally or to your group, could you be paid off by a wealthy investor to
give up the object or engage in an act against it? For each of the acts below, think about your payoff
point in dollars from $0 (for free) to $1million, including the option of saying that you would never do it
for any amount of money. Keep in mind that if you choose to carry out an act and receive payment you
will not suffer any consequences:
• Kick a dog in the head, hard.
• Sign a secret but binding pledge to hire only people of your race into your company
• Burn your country’s flag in private
• Throw a rotten tomato at a political leader that you dislike.
• Get a one pint transfusion of disease-free, compatible blood from a convicted child molester.
If you are like the subjects in these experiments, the mere process of considering a payoff, even
for a short period of time, will have turned your stomach into knots and triggered a deep sense of disgust.
This is because violating the sacred is akin to violating our sense of humanness. It is playing with the
devil, accepting a Faustian offer of money to strip something of its moral worth. As Haidt notes, even
though it is sacrilege to accept payment across different moral concerns, including avoiding harm, acting
fairly, and respecting authority, different experiences can modulate the aversion we feel when we imagine
such transgressions. Women typically demand more money for each of these acts than men, and more
often reject them as taboo. Those who lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum either
ask for more money or consider the act taboo when compared to liberals, and this was especially the case
for questions focused on acting against an in-group (race), an authority figure (political leader), or ones
purity (blood transfusion). What this shows is that our cultural experiences can distort what we consider
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 93
morally worthy or sacred. It shows how easily we can flip our values in the face of tempting alternatives.
The scientific evidence presented in this section shows that our decisions to treat others according
to different moral principles or norms is powerfully affected by our sense of what counts as another
human being. What counts includes at least two important dimensions, one focused on agency and the
other on experience. These dimensions determine whether we blame or praise someone, punish or
rehabilitate them, and ultimately, include or exclude them from the inner circles of moral agents or moral
patients. Those who fall outside these two inner circles are morally worthless. Those who are morally
worthless can be destroyed or banished. Some things are justifiably excluded and fit with our general
sense of reality ⎯⎯ rocks, dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic balls, and pieces of glass. Other things are
excluded because they don’t fit with our values of what reality should be. This is where distortion and
denial enter the process. This is where we create walls around members of one group in order to keep
others out. This is where we express partiality instead of the impartiality that Lady Justice champions
with her two balanced scales and blind fold-covered eyes. This is where we exclude others from our inner
sanctum in order to justify great harms. How is the inner sanctum set up and put into action over a
lifetime, sometimes for legitimate causes and sometimes for illegitimate and unconscionable causes?
Populating the inner sanctum
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor, remarked that “anti-Semitism is the most
ancient form of prejudice.” This claim may well be true of human written history, but is most definitely
false if one considers the fact that all social animals and human societies, including the hunter-gatherer
groups that are descendants of people that predated the Jews, hate some individuals and love others.
Prejudice, though often based on deep seated ideological biases and stereotypes that humans invent, is, at
root, a form of partiality. Every social animal, either extinct or alive today, expresses partiality. This is a
highly adaptive and ancient psychology, promoting the care of young, investment in mates, and escape
strategies against enemies. Humans are no different, except for the role that our promiscuous brains play
in fueling partiality with ideology and symbolism. Sometimes when we express our partiality it is for the
noble cause of caring for our children and for defending ideological beliefs surrounding humanitarian
causes, including defense of basic human rights. Sometimes when we express our partiality, it is for the
ignoble cause of destroying others. How does human partiality begin? Do babies express preferences for
certain social categories? How does their experience sculpt new categories? How is the inner sanctum
populated, enabling us to preferentially help those within and harm those outside?
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 94
At birth, newborns preferentially listen to their native language over a non-native language. Soon
thereafter, infants prefer to listen to their native dialect over a non-native dialect, and look longer at their
own race than another race. This shows that they can discriminate between different languages, dialects,
and racial groups. But do they form social preferences based on these distinctions? Would a young baby
or child prefer to take a toy from an unfamiliar person who speaks the same or different language, from
the same or different race? To answer these questions, the American psychologist Katharine Kinzler put 5
months old babies to a test.
Babies born into mono-racial and mono-lingual families sat on their mother’s lap in front of two
monitors, each presenting short video clips of different people. After watching the videos, Kinzler
created a bit of magic. The people in the monitor appeared to emerge from the 2D image and offer the
baby a toy. The trick: a real person, hidden beneath the monitor, synchronized her reach with the reach in
the monitor. Who would the baby choose given that both people offered the same toy? Babies preferred
people speaking the native over non-native language, and native-accent over the non-native accent. At
this young age, however, they showed no preference for native over non-native race. Thus, early in life
the connection between discrimination and social preference is well established for language, but not race.
When do things change for race?
Kinzler carried out another series of experiments on race with one group of 2.5 year old children
and a second group of 5-year olds. Though the methods were somewhat different, they both focused on
the child’s preferences, including who they would share toys with and who they would prefer as friends.
The 2.5 year olds showed no preferences, whereas the 5 year olds preferred their own race. Race is
therefore a slowly developing category, at least in terms of its impact on social preferences, and especially
when contrasted with both language and accent.
Kinzler took these studies one step further to explore whether there is anything like a hierarchy
among these social categories and the features that define them. What’s more important to a young child
building an inner sanctum of trusted others ⎯⎯race, language, or dialect? Would they rather interact with
someone of the same race who speaks a foreign language or someone of a different race who speaks the
native language? Using similar procedures, Kinzler showed that by 4-5 years of age, language trumps
race. Children would rather interact with someone from a different race speaking the same language than
someone of the same race speaking a foreign language.
Why would language trump race? Kinzler's answer relies on an idea developed by the American
evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban. Imagine a hunter-gatherer in South Africa, living during the
earliest stages of our evolutionary history. As individuals searched for food to eat, areas to sleep, water to
drink, and places to avoid, they came across other individuals. These individuals were always members
of the same race. Racial differences did not emerge until relatively late in human evolution, well after our
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 95
ancestors took their first steps out of Africa. If we are thinking about an evolved psychology for bonding
with members of our own group and fighting those outside, our ancestors would have been blind to race
as it was not yet an emergent property of our species. Language was, however, a property of our species,
and one that varied across populations. A hunter-gatherer walking the plains of South Africa would
indeed have run into people speaking either a completely different language, or the same language with a
different dialect. New languages are not easily acquired, and nor are new dialects. It takes real talent to
speak a new language or dialect without a trace of ones origins. Thus, like the stotting gazelles,
magnanimous spenders, and healthy evildoers discussed in chapter 2, the native languages and dialects we
speak are honest signals of social group membership. Honesty is supported by the costs we pay to
acquire them. Cheating is hard because there is a start-up cost associated with perfecting the natural
rhythm of a second language or novel dialect.
The babies in Kinzler’s experiments tell us something important: race and language are both
important social categories and discriminable from an early age. But language trumps race as a feature
because it is a better predictor of membership within the inner sanctum, at least early in life. Ultimately,
both language and race allow us to close off some from the inner sanctum and allow others in. Ultimately,
our allegiance to our native language and race can fuel our hatred toward those who look different and
speak in different tongues.
Closed doors
As adults, we tend to rely on rules of thumb to guide our social interactions, including who we trust and
who we distrust. We tend to trust those we know more than those we don’t know. Within the circle of
those we know, we believe those who are more like us than those who are unlike us, using fixed body
features ⎯⎯ race, height, hair color ⎯⎯ flexible psychological features ⎯⎯ food preferences, sports’
interests, religious beliefs ⎯⎯ and features that are flexibly constrained ⎯⎯ language and intelligence.
Together, these different dimensions cause us to close the door on some and open it to others.
Language is particularly interesting. If you can’t understand someone because they don’t speak
your language or because their accent is too heavy, then the issue is not trust, but comprehension. But
what if you can understand the person perfectly well, but they speak with a foreign accent, either one
from a different country (e.g., a French speaker speaking English) or one from the same country but a
different region (e.g., a Southern accent in the northeast of the United States)?
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Subjects in an experiment first listened to people reading trivia, such as “A giraffe can go without
water longer than a camel can,” and then judged whether the sentence was true or false. If the sentence
was read in a foreign accent, subjects were more likely to say that it was false than if it was read in the
native accent. Subjects voiced this opinion even though the experimenter told them that the reader was
not expressing an opinion, but merely reading the passage as instructed. In a second experiment, British
subjects listening to a non-guilty plea by a person on trial were more likely to judge the person as guilty if
he committed a blue collar crime and spoke with a non-standard British accent (e.g., Australian). In
contrast, they were more likely to judge a white collar criminal as guilty if he spoke with a standard
British accent. Even within the class of British accents, biases emerged: subjects from the Worcester
region were more likely to judge supposed criminals as guilty if they spoke with a Birmingham accent
than with a Worcester accent. Together, these studies paint a bleak picture: accents from an out-group are
perceived as less truthful than others, and in the context of a criminal case, more guilty as well.
Accents are learned early in life, and once in place, are both clear markers of your origins and
difficult to undue. As such, they are honest indicators of at least one dimension of group membership.
What about dimensions that can readily be acquired at any point in life, and just as easily dropped? How
do these influence not only our perception of those who share these dimensions in common, but how we
treat them? In the last chapter I discussed a study by Tania Singer in which both men and women showed
more pain empathy ⎯⎯ as revealed by activation in the insula region of the brain ⎯⎯ when they watched a
cooperator experiencing pain. Further, men showed a reduction of activity in this area when a cheater
experienced pain, and increased activity in a reward area ⎯⎯ the nucleus accumbens. This pattern fits well
with the research on human and nonhuman animals showing that winning, and watching winners win,
triggers a choreographed ballet of physiological responses associated with reward. Singer took this work
further, asking whether an individual’s support for a sport’s team might similarly modulate both the
feeling of pain empathy as well as reward. Subjects, all soccer fanatics, sat in a scanner and watched as a
player from their favorite team or a rival experienced pain. Next, Singer provided subjects with three
options for interacting with these players: help them by personally taking on some of the pain they would
receive, letting them take on all the pain but watch a video as distraction, or let them take on all the pain
and watch as it happens. Option one is costly altruism, two is blissful ignorance, and three is
schadenfreude.
In parallel with the earlier work on fairness, here too Singer observed greater pain empathy when
the favorite team player experienced pain than when the rival experienced pain. She also observed that
subjects were more likely to help favorite team players by taking on some of their pain, but more likely to
watch rivals receive pain. The higher the activation level in the insula, the more they took on their
favorite team player’s pain session ⎯⎯ the more they helped. When they watched rivals experience pain,
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there was significant activation in the nucleus accumbens. They felt an immediate honey hit, joy over the
rival’s pain. The higher the activation in this reward area, the more likely they were to choose the option
of watching the rival experience pain ⎯⎯ like watching a public execution and cheering for just deserts.
These results show that individual differences in our compassion toward others in pain predicts our
willingness to help them. It reveals another dimension, like language, that biases our sense of justice, both
in our judgments and in our behavior. Conversely, individual differences in our joy over others’ misery
predicts our willingness to allow others to suffer, suppress our instincts to help and, I suggest, facilitate
our capacity to harm. Similar response patterns arise in the context of race ⎯⎯ a feature of group
membership that is fixed at birth.
As noted earlier, babies stare longer at faces of people from the same race than from people of a
different race, and by the pre-school years, are more likely to show social preferences for peers and adults
of the same race. In brain imaging studies, specific areas activate when we process faces as opposed to
other objects, and one tenth of a second later, other associated regions activate when we process race.
This rapid activation occurs whether we are consciously engaged in classifying faces by race or not; for
example, the same areas activate even when we are forced to focus on gender or familiarity. This shows
that from the brain’s perspective, we don’t have an option of processing a person’s race. The brain
automatically and unconsciously hands us this information, like it or not.
The fact that we process race automatically gains importance based on a powerful set of
behavioral studies showing that virtually every person, independently of their explicit avowals of nonracist
attitudes, holds implicit or unconscious racist biases. Using a research tool developed by the social
psychologists Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji called the Implicit Attitudes Test or IAT, subjects see
different faces or read different descriptions of people, and then make evaluative judgments about these
people. Often, the presentations are rapid so that there is little or no time to reflect upon the evaluation.
For example, in a study focused on race, subjects first classified photographs of people’s faces as either
Caucasian or Black. Next they classified words into those associated with good positive meaning ⎯⎯ joy
and friend ⎯⎯ and those with bad negative meaning ⎯⎯ hate and bomb. In the third and critical step,
subjects saw faces and words together and, using a rule provided by the experimenter, struck one of two
keys on a keyboard as fast as possible: for example, strike the #1 key if you see a Black face and a good
word, but the #2 key if you see a Caucasian face and a good word. The intuition here is that if certain
faces and words are more strongly associated, because this is what people have learned over time, then
they will press the relevant key faster than for weaker associations. Results from several studies confirm
this intuition. For example, Caucasian subjects who explicitly deny racist attitudes are nonetheless slower
to respond when Black, as opposed to Caucasian faces are associated with good words, and faster to
respond when Black, as opposed to Caucasian faces are associated with bad words. These patterns hold
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 98
even when subjects respond to names commonly associated with Caucasian and Black people. A quick
skim through the many blogs commenting on this work reveals a common refrain that makes the key
point: many that have taken this test, whether focusing on race, sexual orientation, or political affiliation,
opine that the test must be invalid because they explicitly disavow any groupish biases. But that’s the
point! What we disavow explicitly has less impact than we would like on what we hold implicitly.
If our implicit system champions one view of racism and our explicit system another, then we are
continuously faced with an epic conflict. To resolve this conflict, and enable the explicit system to emerge
triumphant, requires self-control, keeping the implicit system quiet. Studies of the brain provide
interesting insights into this process. Recall that when we experience conflict, regardless of its content,
there is activation in the anterior cingulate. When we exert self-control, regardless of content, there is
activation in particular regions within the prefrontal cortex. When we feel threatened by a dangerous
animal or person, there is activation in the amygdala. These three brain regions tell an interesting story
about how we process race. When Caucasian subjects view faces of Black as opposed to Caucasian
people staring at them, there is greater activation in the amygdala. This racial difference disappears if
subjects view photos of faces looking away or with eyes closed. It is the potentially threatening aspect of
a face staring at you that engages the racial difference. If you briefly flash faces at Caucasian subjects so
that they are unaware of them, there is stronger activation in the amygdala for Black than Caucasian
faces. But if you present the faces for long enough, allowing them to enter conscious awareness, the
amygdala’s pattern of activity goes away, replaced instead by strong activation in the anterior cingulate
and prefrontal cortex. Staring longer at someone from a different race triggers a sense of conflict and
engages the system of self-control, pushing down our implicit racism to enable more explicit neutrality
and equality.
What this work shows is that understanding our attitudes and actions toward those of the same
and different race requires consideration of implicit and explicit components. Think of this process like a
hand pushing down on an automatic watering fountain. The machinery that produces the pressure to push
water out of the holes in the fountain operates without concern for what happens outside in the world. The
hand that pushes down is under human control, consciously guided, perhaps with the aim of simply
spreading the water or feeling its’ coolness on a hot day. Though the hand may try to control the
movement of the water, it may only do so to some extent, guided by the power of the automatic engine
below. Thus, we have an automatic bottom up mechanism and a controlled top down mechanism. So it is
with race. The bottom up mechanism operates automatically, pushing forward our implicit prejudice. The
top down mechanism attempts to exert control, when and where it can, to avoid looking racist, sexist, or
what have you. Somewhere, the two meet, creating a personality profile that is more explicitly racist,
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 99
sexist, or X-ist in some cases than others, either because the individual lacks top down control or because
they decide to relinquish it.
In parallel with Singer’s work on the relationship between pain empathy and our classification of
others as fair-minded cooperators or narcissistically-minded cheaters, so too does race influence our
expression of compassion toward those in pain. Both Caucasian, Black and Asian subjects showed
stronger activation in the pain-related areas of the brain when viewing individuals from the same race
experience pain than when viewing individuals of a different race. When Black subjects played a
computerized game involving social ostracism, they showed stronger activation in areas of the brain
involved in social pain when excluded by Caucasian players than when excluded by Black players. When
others suffer and we have the opportunity to help them, we are more likely to help those of the same race,
and feel good about it as evidenced by activation of brain areas involved in reward.
Our biases, both implicit and explicit, influence our compassion toward others and our motivation
to help. This statement is true whether we are looking at evidence from young children or adults, and
using measures that assess sensory perception, behavioral judgment, or activity patterns in the brain.
Beginning with an evolutionarily ancient brain system that was designed to distinguish friendly ingroup
members and antagonistic outgroup members, we populate the inner sanctum with people who we
perceive as most like us, using both fixed and variable features. With time, the walls surrounding this
sanctum close, attributing the full richness of human nature to those within, and bleaching it from those
outside.
Bleaching humanity
Draw an imaginary circle around yourself with a diameter of about fifty feet. Now imagine packing this
circle with people, forming an expanding set of concentric circles that radiates out from those closest to
you to those you don’t know at all. Based on social network analyses by sociologists such as Nicholas
Christakis, the majority of people within the inner circles will be like you in a number of ways, including
their race, religion, political affiliation, food preferences, and aesthetics. This includes family members
and close friends, but also those we work with, vote for, and play with. As you travel from the inner core
to the outside, you will find less in common. Some in the outer core will not only have less in common,
but as noted earlier in this chapter based on work by Gray, Wegner and Haslam, will be perceived as less
human, stripped of dimensions of experience and agency that define humanity. Some will appear like
objects, others like animals. When we transform others into objects, we have stripped away core aspects
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 100
of human nature, including emotional sensitivity, warmth, and flexibility. When we transform others into
animals, we have stripped them of uniquely human qualities such as rationality, self-control, moral
sensibility, and civility. Of those who are like animals, some will seem like kin to the domesticated form
and thus controllable as property; others will seem like wild animals and thus dangerous, dirty and
deserving of elimination. However we engage this process, we have bleached individuals of their
humanity. This process, one that occurs in both everyday life and in cases of conflict, has allowed us to
treat the mentally and physically disabled like animals, to consider women as sexual property, justify
slavery and slave wages, deny certain races the opportunity to vote and receive education, and mandate
ethnic cleansing.
Before I describe a shocking set of experimental findings on dehumanization, consider first a
snapshot into some of our historical attitudes, shared across many countries and cultures. Before we
knew much about human evolution and the causes of variation, scientists made sweeping statements
about the relationship between brain structure and differences in intelligence and behavior among men,
women and the variety of races. It was commonly believed that, compared with white men, women and
all other races had smaller brains, approximating our cousins the apes. Listen to Gustave LeBon, a
distinguished social psychologist, writing in 1879:
In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large
number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas
than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious
that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth
discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of
women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they
represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are
closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They
excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and
incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished
women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as
the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads;
consequently, we may neglect them entirely.
By elevating white men to the gold standard of perfection, it was easy to see everyone else as a
degenerate form of God’s creation or, in biological terms, of arrested evolution, with non-Caucasian races
showing greater affinity to our furry cousins the apes. Looked at today, backed by our understanding of
genetics and the evolutionary process, these accounts are absurd and offensive. Sadly, despite efforts to
clean up our explicit racist and sexist attitudes, overwhelming evidence reveals that the brain holds dear a
suite of unconscious prejudices that serve to dehumanize those unlike us.
Now the shocking experiments. The American social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt dared to
ask whether US citizens unconsciously associate Black people with imagery ofd apes, using the
disturbing history of this association as her jumping off point. In parallel with the studies of race
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 101
presented in the last section, Eberhardt was also interested in the possibility that if people carry this
association around in their head, they do so unconsciously, despite explicit avowals that they are not at all
racist. And if they carry this association around unconsciously, how does it impact upon their judgments
and actions?
In one experiment with both Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects, Eberhardt used a technique
called subliminal priming. Subliminal priming involves rapidly presenting pictures, sounds or other
experiences under the radar of awareness and then presenting material that falls within our radar. If the
two experiences are similar, the unconscious version affects subjects’ perception of the conscious one.
For example, if you first prime people by flashing the picture of a woman’s face, subjects then respond
faster to faces of women than to faces of men. In other words, despite the fact that subjects are unaware of
the prime, it affects their judgments. Eberhardt first primed subjects with photographed faces of
Caucasian or Black people or an unrecognizable non-face. They then watched a short movie that started
off with an unrecognizable object that looked like it was covered by dense snow. As the movie
progressed, the snow lifted, making it easier to recognize the object as a line drawing of either a duck,
dolphin, alligator, squirrel or ape. Subjects stopped the movie as soon as they recognized the animal.
Compared with Caucasian faces and non-faces, priming with Black faces caused subjects to stop
the movie much sooner for apes, but not for any other animal. Compared with non-faces, priming with
Caucasian faces caused subjects to stop the movie much later for apes, but not for any other animal. This
suggests that Black faces made it easier to identify apes, whereas Caucasian faces made it harder to
identify apes, with no comparable effects for any other animals. Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects
showed the same pattern of response, and so too did individuals with and without strong, explicit racial
attitudes. Although the similarity among Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects is of interest, and
suggests that the association is held even among those who were perhaps less strongly associated with
this form of dehumanization, there were relatively few Black subjects in this non-Caucasian group. This
first set of experiments suggests, therefore, that among a racially heterogeneous group of educated
Stanford undergraduates, individuals carry an unconscious association between Black people and apes,
and thus, an unconsciously dehumanized representation of another human being. Given the animal form
of this dehumanization, the implication from Haslam’s work is that Caucasians associate Blacks with less
rationality, civility, and self-control, in essence, less uniquely human qualities.
These are remarkable and disturbing findings. They can’t be explained by some superficial
similarity between human faces and animals because Eberhardt found the same results when she
presented either line drawings or words of animals. Had Eberhardt used actual photographs of animals,
subjects could have used similarity in skin color or nose shape ⎯⎯ for example, seeing a black human face
would prime seeing a black ape face because both have the color black in common. Line drawings and
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written words cut the legs out of this account. Eberhardt’s results suggest that apes are associated with the
socio-cultural, racial category “Black.”
These findings reveal a deep seated, dehumanized representation that is readily triggered even in
highly educated people. But perhaps they are less disturbing then we might imagine. not so bad if the
take home message is that we are closet racists with antiquated theories of evolution or God’s design.
Outside of these artificial studies, we are well educated citizens who keep our isms tucked away, locked
up in our unconscious. Unfortunately, the unsettling feelings that many will have to these studies are
exacerbated by an additional set of results collected by Eberhardt, linking unconscious impressions to
harmful actions. Caucasian male subjects watched a video of a policeman using force to subdue a suspect
who was either Black or Caucasian. When primed with an ape drawing, but not that of a tiger, subjects
were more likely to say that the policeman was justified in subduing the Black suspect than the Caucasian
suspect. We are more than closet racists. We are out of the closet, armed for prejudice and
dehumanization.
To unconsciously think that Blacks are more like apes than other racial groups is to strip them of
characteristics that are uniquely human. As Haslam notes, when we dehumanize others in this particular
way, we no longer see them as human, but as incompetent wild animals or immature children lacking in
intelligence, etiquette, rationality, and moral wherewithal. This mode of dehumanization is ancient,
reflected in the writings and paintings of European explorers who encountered indigenous cultures in
Asia, Australia, and Africa. Dehumanizing others into objects is equally ancient, unflattering and
dangerous. In one study, American adults were told to focus on either the physical appearance or
personality of the actress Angelina Jolie and the ex-governor of Alaska and presidential hopeful Sarah
Palin ⎯⎯ both famous personalities within the United States. When subjects focused on appearance as
opposed to personality, they judged both Jolie and Palin as relatively lacking in traits of experience or
human nature. Jolie and Palin were seen as objects. In other studies, carried out by Haslam, subjects
judged objectified men and women as less capable of suffering and less deserving of moral compassion
and protection, reinforcing the age old attitude we once held toward slaves, and that many hold today
toward prostitutes. When people become property, they fall outside of the circle of moral patients. Studies
of the brain provide further support for these dehumanizing transformations, and highlight, once again,
both the beneficial and malignant consequences of our mind’s promiscuity.
Brains without borders
Dehumanization enables doctors to treat their patients ⎯⎯ human or nonhuman animal ⎯⎯ as mechanical
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 103
devices that require repair. This allows for cool-headed, rational, and skillful surgeries, while fending off
the humanizing emotions of compassion and empathy. This is adaptive. This is a transformation that
enables doctors working in war-torn areas or regions afflicted with a disease outbreak, to treat hundreds
of suffering patients as if they were treating inert cars on an assembly line. Good doctors allow their
compassion and empathy to return as their patients regain awareness. Bad doctors maintain their cool,
detached manner, insensitive to the physical and psychological pain of their waking patients. Bad doctors
continue to perceive their patients like cars on the assembly line. Really bad doctors see their patients like
cars that were created for personal R&D.
Recall from earlier sections that when we see someone else in pain, particular areas of the brain
activate as we imagine their suffering. Many of the same areas of the brain also activate when we
personally experience pain. This is the circuitry for pain empathy. The French cognitive neuroscientist
Jean Decety showed that when physicians look at video clips of people experiencing pain from a needle
prick, this circuit is suppressed relative to non-physicians. For physicians, it’s as if they were watching a
needle prick a pillow. Though we don’t know how much experience was necessary or sufficient to cause
the physician’s lack of pain empathy, or the extent to which physicians are physicians because they were
born with less empathy, Decety’s findings point to individual differences in our capacity to feel what
others feel and the potential modulating role of experience.
Several studies now show that based on individual experience, the human brain readily flip-flops
between empathy and callousness. In two similarly designed experiments, one recording from pain related
areas in the brain, and the other from a motor area associated with the hand, Caucasian and Black subjects
watched a video of a needle penetrating a human hand. Consistently, subjects showed weaker activation
in the pain and motor areas when watching the needle penetrate the hand from another race. This lowering
of pain empathy and motor response for the out-group was greatest for subjects with the highest implicit
or unconscious racial biases, as measured with the IAT tool noted earlier.
These studies of the brain, like the behavioral studies I discussed earlier, add to the idea that we
have a racial bias for pain empathy. We feel others’ pain, but only for those who share the same race. But
since, by definition, we look more like those from within our racial group than those outside it, perhaps
the bias is less about race and more about those that don’t look like us. To explore this possibility, Black
and Caucasian subjects saw a needle penetrate a violet-colored hand. Violet hands are not only different,
but far more different than either black or white hands in terms of our experience of skin coloration.
Nonetheless, the activation pattern in the brain matched the subject’s own race. When we feel less
compassion for someone of another race, it is because of racial biases, not because of superficial
differences in appearance. Color is simply a cue that reminds us of our prejudice.
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The fact that we feel less empathy for people in pain if they fall outside our inner sanctum
suggests that we have dehumanized them, stripping away dimensions of experience that humanize those
within the sanctum. These are the dimensions associated with emotion, and when taken away, cause us to
perceive the other as an object. Since objects can’t feel pain or joy, we can’t share in their experience
because they lack experience altogether. If that is the case, then when we perceive any human group that
has been dehumanized in this particular way, there should be little to no activity in those areas of the brain
associated with thinking, feeling, wanting, and believing. To explore this possibility, the social
psychologist Susan Fiske placed subjects in a brain scanner and presented photographs of either extreme
out-group members, such as the homeless and drug addicts, or photographs of other groups such as the
elderly, middle-class Americans, and the rich. When viewing the extreme out-group, not only did Fiske
see little activity in an area critically related to self-awareness and the process of thinking about others
thoughts and emotions ⎯⎯ the medial prefrontal cortex ⎯⎯ but she also observed an intense increase of
activity in the insula, a brain area that is recruited when we experience disgust.
Fiske’s results highlight the dangers of dehumanization. Once we turn off areas of the brain that
are involved in thinking about others’ thoughts and emotions, and turn on areas involved in disgust, we
have set ourselves up for moral disengagement. As the distinguished American psychologist Albert
Bandura has documented through decades of research, moral disengagement allows people to justify harm
by transforming lethal motives into morally justified and even benevolent ones. Moral disengagement
allows us to excuse ourselves from moral responsibility, either disregarding the harm imposed or
convincing ourselves that it was justified, even obligatory. In several international studies of school-aged
children, results consistently show that those who are most morally disengaged are most likely to engage
in various forms of aggression, including bullying and repeated criminal offenses. These same children
are also least likely to engage in helpful behavior, revealing that moral disengagement dispenses with the
typical process of self-censure and sanctioning that we carry around when we are morally engaged. In a
study of American prison personnel involved in death penalty sentences, executioners were more morally
disengaged than support staff or prison guards. Executioners were more likely to dehumanize the
convicted prisoner and provide moral and economic justifications. Executioners also felt less guilt
because they had developed a narrative to justify their actions, one that ascribed complete fault and
responsibility to the victim. Support staff flipped in the opposite direction, fully involved with the
weighty moral issues associated with ending someone’s life. In a study of people’s political attitudes,
those with strong right wing authoritarian views, commonly associated with fascism and submission to
authority, were more likely to support war by means of morally disengaging. In particular, they were most
likely to support war by justifying its necessity and trivializing the harm that will necessarily arise ⎯⎯ for
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example, invading another country is not aggressive, but designed as a pre-emptive strike to protect group
interests.
Moral disengagement enables behaviors that are either immoral, illegal, or counter to deeply
rooted intuitive prohibitions against harming others. It is a process that has the beneficial consequence of
empowering soldiers to go to war under just causes, as well as the toxic consequence of empowering
rogue leaders to carry out genocide under unjust causes. It is a process that allows us to hibernate from
our moral responsibilities. It is a form of self-deception, a partner to dehumanization in the denial of
reality. But self-deception, like deception of others, is not always harmful. In fact, it is often highly
adaptive.
Angelic denial
In a nationally televised address in 2005, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pronounced that
the Jews had "created a myth in the name of the Holocaust and consider it above God, religion and the
prophets." Judge Daniel Schreber believed that his brain was softening and that he was turning into a
woman in order to form a sexual union with God. During a doctor’s visit, a man reported that his pet
poodle had been replaced by an impostor, masquerading as if he was the real deal. Judge Patrick
Couwenberg stated under oath that he received the Purple Heart for military operations in Vietnam, and
soon thereafter carried out covert missions in Southeast Asia and Africa as a CIA agent. The pilots of Air
Florida flight 90 ignored signs from their dashboard indicating engine trouble and then proceeded to crash
into a bridge, killing 74 of the 79 people on board. In 2008, while Hilary Clinton was running for
President of the United States, she regaled admiring supporters with stories of her international
experience, including her visit to Bosnia in 1996 where her plane was forced to land “under sniper fire”,
followed by a rapid evacuation for cover. When I was a teenager, I often walked onto the tennis court
thinking that I was John McEnroe, serving and volleying like the world’s number one player.
Each case above tells the story of a person who acted as if the world was one way even though it
wasn’t. The Holocaust and its trail of atrocities were real, confirmed by thousands of scarred survivors
and the relatives who have heard their accounts. Judge Couwenberg was never in Vietnam, never earned a
Purple Heart, and never had a connection with the CIA. There are no pet poodle impostors. Our brains
don’t soften, though they do deteriorate with age. When dashboard indicators suggest engine trouble,
better to be safe than sorry when you are responsible for the lives of many people. Hilary Clinton landed
in the exceptionally safe airport of Tuzla where she was warmly greeted by US and Bosnian officials. I
am no McEnroe.
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In each of these cases, there was a mismatch with reality. The person harbored a false belief, but
believed it was true. In some cases, the mismatch was due to psychosis, some kind of delusion or
malfunctioning of the brain. These people didn’t know that their beliefs were false. In other cases, the
mismatch resulted from an intentional lie or distortion, a process that is adaptive, designed to promote
self-confidence and manipulate others. When I conjured up images of McEnroe, I momentarily deceived
myself. I believed it helped my game. I never thought I was McEnroe. I carried my self-deception
honestly. When Hilary Clinton misreported her trip to Bosnia, perhaps she misremembered or perhaps she
distorted her memory to convince voters that she had what was necessary to run the country ⎯⎯ toughness
and international experience. Unfortunately for Clinton, her comment about Bosnia was accompanied by
other distortions, which led the American essayist William Safire to write “Americans of all political
persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady... is a congenital liar.”
Some cases of self-deception are harmless and even beneficial, as in my illusion of tennis
grandeur. Others are only mildly harmful, as in Clinton’s distortion of her political experiences. And yet
others are deeply harmful, as when leaders such as Ahmadinejad deny the suffering of millions. The
problem is that anyone can harness the power of self-deception for ill gotten gains.
Why does our mind play tricks on us, allowing us to believe things that are false? Why didn’t
evolution endow us with a reality checking device that is vigilant 24/7? The answer here parallels the
refrain carried throughout this book: like its evil sister dehumanization, self-deception is Janus-faced,
showing both an adaptive and maladaptive side. Self-deception allows us to protect ourselves from the
reality of a current predicament or loss. Self-deception allows us to provide a better personal marketing
brand to defeat our competitors in attracting mates and garnering other resources. Self-deception may
even be critical to the functioning of a healthy and safe society: in a study of male criminal offenders,
those with the lowest levels of self-deception with respect to their own self-worth showed the highest
levels of recidivism. There is, however, a fine balancing act, revealing the slippery slope from adaptive to
maladaptive: as studies by Roy Baumeister reveal, individuals with the highest self-esteem and the most
overblown sense of themselves are also the ones most likely to lash out with extreme violence when
someone threatens the reality of their stature.
The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers was the first to identify the adaptive significance of
self-deception and its connection to deception. As he insightfully notes in his book The Folly of Fools,
what appears completely irrational about self-deception evolved as a consequence of selection to deceive
competitors: “To fool others we might be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of
improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously.” The most effective self-deceiver acts without any
sense of his true motives. He is on autopilot, driven by a purely self-interested mind. No checks and
balances. Here, I build on this idea. I will show you how studies of pathology and healthy brain function
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 107
illuminate the mental chicaneries that lead us down the road to self-deception. As with the dangers of
dehumanization and its role in denying reality, so too is self-deception a dangerous state of mind,
allowing individuals to inflict great harm while feeling aligned with the angels.
What did William Safire have in mind when he called Hilary Clinton a congenital liar?
Congenital refers to a trait that is present in utero, at birth or soon thereafter. Congenital disorders,
diseases, or anomalies typically refer to defects caused by a combination of genetic and environmental
problems. A cleft lip is an example of a congenital anomaly, one that appears at birth as a gap in the
upper lip. Because we don’t have detailed records of Hilary Clinton’s life as a child, it is hard to say
whether her lying was congenital in the same way that a hair lip is congenital. We can rule out the in
utero and at birth periods because Hilary, like all other children, was not born speaking or lying. These
capacities mature. That she developed a tendency to exaggerate and distort is consistent with other
reports. She falsely claimed that she was centrally involved in the creation of a Children’s Health
Insurance Program, an initiative that was actually created by Senators Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch. She
also claimed that she played a significant role in the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland, a
comment that Nobel laureate Lord William David Trimble described as “a wee bit silly.” When Safire
described Clinton as a congenital liar, what he was referring to was the habitual pattern of fabrication.
When patterns of the mind become habits, they are hard to break. Each distortion, rehearsed over and
over, becomes part of the fabric of truth. It is a life story that starts as fiction and ends up as non-fiction in
the mind of the story-teller. We can begin to understand this transformation by looking at the clinician’s
notebook.
For more than 100 years, psychiatrists have described a syndrome known as pathological lying.
If lying is pathological, it must deviate from some norm. The psychiatrist Charles Dike sums up the
essence of this disorder:
Pathological liars can believe their lies to the extent that, at least to
others, the belief may appear to be delusional; they generally have sound
judgment in other matters; it is questionable whether pathological lying
is always a conscious act and whether pathological liars always have
control over their lies; an external reason for lying (such as financial
gain) often appears absent and the internal or psychological purpose for
lying is often unclear; the lies in pathological lying are often unplanned
and rather impulsive; the pathological liar may become a prisoner of his
or her lies; the desired personality of the pathological liar may
overwhelm the actual one; pathological lying may sometimes be
associated with criminal behavior; the pathological liar may
acknowledge, at least in part, the falseness of the tales when
energetically challenged; and, in pathological lying, telling lies may
often seem to be an end in itself.
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What seems most critical to the pathology is the lack of control which leads to repetitive lying over a long
period of time. Compared with run of the mill liars, pathological liars often seem unaware that they are
lying and do so many times a day as part of their daily habit. In the same way that birds have to fly and
fish have to swim, pathological liars have to lie. If pathological liars are unaware of their lies and
incapable of controlling themselves, then they are not responsible for the harm they impose. They have no
choice. Unbeknownst to them, their brain has been hijacked by a creative fiction writer. They are
following a script, but have no sense of its author.
Dike’s summary is based on a loose and eclectic set of clinical observations. Several clinicians
thus debate whether habitual lying counts as pathology and thus, whether it is worthy of an entry into the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. For example, how can the clinician establish
pathology given the evidence that healthy people lie about twice a day, physicians lie about 40-80% of the
time to help their patients gain better health care, and lying within an experimental context increases as
subjects generate more lies? My own sense is that despite the difficulty of defining the pathology with
precision, clinicians have identified individuals that lie with every breath and often identify psychopaths
by their calculated conning. These observations sharpen our approach to understanding the seeds of deceit
and self-deception in the non-pathological condition. For example, does excessive and sustained lying
stem from a specific problem associated with recognizing the truth or does it grow from a more general
problem with self-control? Or, does the habitual liar suffer from an emotional deficit such that when he or
she lies, there are no feelings of guilt and shame? Without these emotional regulators, it is impossible to
learn from the harm caused. When healthy people distort the truth, they often feel bad. When healthy
people think about distorting the truth, they often think about the potential harm and then silence the
option to lie in favor of the truth. Perhaps unhealthy people never hear these emotional alarms. The mind
sciences have begun addressing these issues.
The American neuroscientist Adrian Raine reported that individuals with a history of repeated
lying and con-artistry have structurally different brains from non-liars, including individuals with a
history of anti-social problems. Habitual liars have more white matter in the frontal lobes, but less grey
matter. White matter consists of axons and myelin. The axon is the part of a nerve cell that carries
information. It is like the electric cable that runs from the power station. Myelin covers the axon, at least
in healthy individuals. It is like the fat around your bones, protecting and insulating neurons. Fat helps
keep us warm. Myelin helps neurons transmit information. The grey matter consists of nerve cell bodies,
which lack myelin. The function of grey matter is to connect up the neurons to transmit information
between areas of the brain.
Raine suggests that the increase in white matter gives habitual liars the upper hand when it comes
to lying, helping them suppress the truth, control their emotions, and mind read what others believe and
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 109
desire. The decrease in gray matter allows habitual liars to lie without feeling guilty. The messaging
center that sends healthy subjects moral reminders about the virtues of truth, is shut down or barely
audible within the mind of a pathological liar. The brain of a pathological liar allows for the ultimate
poker face. The brain of a healthy individual allows us to perfect the poker face by repeating a distorted
narrative, converting a lie into a self-justified truth. This is dangerous denial.
When we lie, either to manipulate someone else or ourselves, we distort the truth. We can either
do this on the fly or use a narrative held in long-term memory. When Hilary Clinton told her supporters
that she had to dodge bullets in Bosnia, she either lied in the moment to convey a stronger image or she
developed this distortion over a long period of time. In the first instance, she knew that her comment
about Bosnia was false. She was deceptive, but not self-deceived. In the second case, she was selfdeceived
and most likely unaware. Her narrative was so clear that she could picture running for cover
without the usual welcoming party. Several studies now reveal that both forms of lying engage brain
areas associated with self-control and conflict⎯⎯ the right backside of the prefrontal cortex and the
anterior cingulate. This makes sense. To tell a lie, either to oneself or another, requires controlling what
we know about reality to convey an alternative reality. When we hold both versions of this narrative in
mind, there is conflict. As we rehearse one version more than the other, the conflict dissipates. The more
we rehearse, the more we push this narrative into long term memory. The more we push this narrative
into long term memory, the more it becomes part of what we believe is true. The more we believe it is
true, the more we hold onto a narrative that can be used to justify our actions.
The imaging results fit well with our understanding of which brain regions are involved in selfcontrol,
conflict, memory, and social knowledge. To understand which regions are either necessary or
sufficient for representing truths and lies, we turn to a technique called transcranial direct current
stimulation. This method allows researchers to safely increase or decrease activity in a brain area
through electrical stimulation. Think of this technique as a volume knob on an old fashioned radio. Turn it
clockwise and you amplify the signal. Turn it counter-clockwise and you quiet the signal. When the
German neuroscientist Ahmed Karim and his colleagues applied this technique to the right backside of
the prefrontal cortex, and decreased activity, healthy subjects were better at telling lies, lied without guilt,
and were less stressed out as measured by the sweatiness of their skin. This pattern mirrors the natural
state of pathological liars. Absent the circuitry in the brain that exerts self-control over our distortions,
Karim turned healthy subjects into conscience-free, poker-faced, liars.
If self-deception and deception are not only part of normal brain function, but adaptive processes,
then what makes this system turn toxic? What tips the brain over to the dark side, allowing self-deceptive
illusions to empower the individuals and groups to cause great harm?
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I am God!
Across the globe, in Eastern and Western cultures, clinicians have reported a consistent pattern of
psychotic delusion, typically associated with schizophrenia: many believe that they are God, God’s
messenger, or the Devil, equipped with extraordinary, invincible powers. This is the same disorder that
led the Australian gentleman we encountered at the start of this chapter to believe that he had two heads
and heard the voices of Jesus and Abraham. Estimates reveal a greater number of cases among Catholic
than Islamic or Protestant societies, and the fewest among Hindu societies, although experts are uncertain
as to why such particular biases exist. The interesting point is that there are individual differences in the
expression of religious delusions that are at least partially mediated by the particular beliefs and customs
of the religion. Religious delusions are also held with greater conviction than other delusions, more
resistant to change, and often result in self-mutilation or harming others; when harm occurs, it follows
the narrative from a religious text, plucking out eyes or cutting off genitals as the means to cleansing
sins.
What makes religious delusions like these, in which the individual has created a narrative of
supreme confidence and power, different from non-delusional, non-psychotic forms of distortion? In a
Gallup poll, 10% of the Americans surveyed claimed they had spoken with the devil. In several
psychological experiments, healthy non-psychotic subjects consistently report that they are smarter than
most, more attractive, and more likely to win than lose an athletic competition. Though some of these
people are correct ⎯⎯ they are in fact smarter, more attractive, and better competitors ⎯⎯ most are wrong
and yet believe they are right. What this research reveals is that we all suffer, some more than others,
from positive illusions ⎯⎯ biases that distort our sense of confidence, control, and invincibility These
illusions differ from delusions in that they are less fixed, more flexible, and more amenable to change.
Delusions are highly maladaptive, a signature of brain dysfunction, and the source of great suffering.
Positive illusions, in contrast, are often highly adaptive, generating the confidence necessary to take on
great challenges and challengers, convincing an audience or a group of opponents that we are stronger,
smarter, and sexier. Positive illusions have been linked to direct mental and physical health benefits,
including evidence that distorted optimism can slow disease progression. Positive illusions are, as noted
by the biologists Richard Wrangham, Robert Trivers, and Dominic Johnson, a form of self-deception with
considerable evolutionary benefits. But like the runaway capacity of desire, so too can our illusions of
grandeur runaway. When this occurs, illusion and delusion are virtually indistinguishable. What was
once a narrative centered on the grandiose belief of being god-like has been transformed into the belief of
being God, leading individuals and groups to engage in extreme extortion or violence, not only blind to
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 111
obvious risks but incredulous that there would be any risks. This is denial. This is another way in which
we close off our senses to reality in order to create our own imagined reality. How does this process get
started?
It is not until the age of about 18-24 months that we acquire the ability to recognize ourselves in a
mirror. It is not until a couple of years later that we have a sense that our own beliefs can sometimes
differ from others that we interact with. It is not until this time that we develop the capacity to deceive,
along with a powerful suite of social emotions that enable us to feel embarrassed, envious, and elated.
These feelings link up our sense of self with our sense of others. These are comparative feelings and
beliefs, and they feed back to who we are, either building up our self-confidence or crushing it. When my
daughter Sofia was ten years old, she announced that she will one day go to Brown University ⎯⎯
attracted by their course offerings and the fact that Emma Watson, aka Hermione Granger of Harry Potter
fame, was a student ⎯⎯ be rich and have five children ⎯⎯ she wanted more siblings and has always had a
taste for the luxurious ⎯⎯ obtain a veterinarian degree ⎯⎯ my wife is a veterinarian and we have five pets
⎯⎯ open a restaurant ⎯⎯ I love to cook ⎯⎯ and be an Olympian in gymnastics ⎯⎯ sports run in our family.
Sofia was not delusional, but brimming with uncalibrated confidence. Her confidence was uncalibrated
because she had no sense of what it takes to get into Brown, become rich, take care of five kids, obtain a
vet degree, open a restaurant, and win gold. My wife and I would be horrid parents if we burst her
bubble. We would be irresponsible parents if we didn’t, over time, describe the exciting challenges
associated with each of these desirable goals.
Developing a sense of self depends on at least two capacities: looking inwards at what we know
and are capable of doing, and looking outwards at what others know and are capable of doing. When we
look inwards, if we honestly open our eyes to the richness of our autobiography, we will recognize cases
where we have succeeded and those in which we have failed. This history reveals our knowledge and
ignorance, our strengths and weaknesses, and our capacity to exert control or meld to external forces.
When we look outwards, again with an honest, panoramic perspective, we learn about those who know
more or less than we do, about those we can outcompete and those we lose to in defeat, and about
situations that undermine our capacity for self-control. Distortion enters these personal narratives when
we either lack information or filter it in some way, consciously or unconsciously.
The British criminology scholar Mandeep Dhami examined positive illusions in criminals
incarcerated in prisons within the United States and the United Kingdom. Because recidivism levels are
high among convicted criminals, with 40-60% of offenders re-convicted after 1-3 years from release, it is
important to understand risk factors. One possibility is that criminals believe that their prior offense was
just a one-off event or bad luck, and that, of course, they will never engage in crime again, having learned
their lesson and feeling fully confident in their capacity to lead a crime-free life. Based on a sample of
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over 500 prisoners from medium security prisons, 60-80% believed that they would find a place to live as
well as employment once released, whereas less than 30% felt that they would commit another crime.
Prisoners also felt that they were much less likely to commit another crime than other prisoners. Thus,
whether prisoners were evaluating their own chances of success or their success relative to others, they
were living with a distorted narrative. The shorter the criminal record, the more distorted the narrative.
Repeated experience with crime appears to anchor the narrative in a more realistic assessment of the
future.
Certain experiences can also enhance positive illusions by giving individuals an unrealistic sense
of self-control, along with a distorted expectation that future outcomes are highly deterministic. For
example, people who are wealthy, highly educated, part of a dominant group, or citizens within a society
that values independence, are more likely to believe that they have control over the future and are more
likely to express optimism and high self-esteem. These attitudes often lead to a boosted sense of control
and an illusory sense of control over future outcomes. The American psychologist Nathanael Fast ran a
series of experiments to further explore the relationship between power and illusory control, specifically
asking whether subjects endowed with power expect control over outcomes that are strictly due to chance
or that are unrelated to the domain of power. Across each study, whether subjects recalled a personal
situation where they were in power or had to imagine being in power, they were more likely than those in
a subordinate position to express confidence about the outcome of rolling a six-sided die, predicting the
future of a company, and influencing the results of a national election. Power and winning distort, a tale
that has been told and retold countless times in the annals of industry and warfare. As the American
business administration scholars Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano note, the business world is full of cases
where leaders and leading companies crash because they fail to examine the causes of success. They
assume, for example, that their success is entirely due to their brilliance, control over the market, and the
weakness of the competition, as opposed to a shot of good luck. So too goes the story of unexamined war
victories, as supremely confident generals discount relevant information about their opponents, leading
battalions on a death march. Our willingness to accept victories without question stands in direct contrast
with our motivation to scrutinize failures, drilling down for explanations or causes. When we lose or fail
in some way, the negative emotions accompanying this experience focus our attention on working out an
explanation. When we win, we bask in the glory, fueled by the brain’s chemicals and the body’s
hormones. This physiological orchestration sets up the positive illusion of overconfidence, a winning
card in many competitive arenas, and a disaster in others.
Recall from chapter 1 that our brains, and the brains of other animals, are configured to reward
victory with a cascade of hormonal and neurobiological changes. Winning delivers a shot of testosterone,
and so too does observing others win. Winning also delivers a shot of dopamine, further generating a
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 113
honey hit to the brain when we shine. There is evidence that schizophrenia is associated with a
dysfunctional dopamine system, which might help explain the overconfidence in their beliefs, especially
beliefs in powerful religious icons. Winning boosts confidence, which increases the chances of winning
again. This is a highly adaptive cycle that can lead to overconfidence.
Dominic Johnson took advantage of the research on human and animal competition to explore the
link between overconfidence, testosterone, and war within the context of a simulated game. Each subject
played the role of a leader in a country at war with another over diamond resources. The goal of the game
was to accrue the highest level of resources or defeat the neighboring country. Though war games on a
computer can not capture the full reality of war, the fact is that military specialists throughout the world
use simulations to prepare combatants for some of the strategic and emotional problems they will
confront.
Most subjects judged that they would outcompete their opponents, and this was exacerbated in
males relative to females. Those who believed that they would whip their opponents actually had the
worst records, suggesting that they were not only uncalibrated but that their distortion of reality led to
costly outcomes. Those with the highest expectation of victory had the highest testosterone levels and
were most likely to launch unprovoked attacks on their opponents.
Whether in real life or in the simulated world of computer games, brimming overconfidence can
lead to a distorted sense of risk and the odds of victory in war ⎯⎯ or any competitive arena. Though this is
a costly strategy, there are clear evolutionary benefits under conditions explained by Trivers and Johnson.
Self-deception is favored when opponents have imperfect information about their strengths and
weaknesses, and where the payoffs are high relative to the costs. Self-deception leads individuals to go
for it, convincing themselves and others that the risks are low, the gains are great, and the standard social
norms are no longer applicable. This is a dangerous form of denial, recruiting moral disengagement to
justify horrific means and ends. This is a piece of the psychology that can facilitate the process of
runaway desire. This is a piece of the psychology that enables individuals to cause great harms.
My goal in this book has been to find the universal core of evil, the elements or ingredients that
are shared across all cases of evil. My suggestion is that the mixture of desire and denial are both
necessary and sufficient ingredients in the recipe for evil. All other ingredients are flourishes, creative
additions that do not take away from the universal core. Within each of us is a recipe for causing
excessive harm and for expressing exceptional compassion. We have choices. But as evidence
accumulates from the sciences, it has become increasingly clear that some of us have fewer choices than
others. Some of us are equipped to resist the temptations of a culture of evil, while others fall prey. This is
the story of our species. This is our story.
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 114
Endnotes: Chapter 3
Recommended books:
Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The Science of Evil. New York: Basic Books.
Hamburg, D. (2008). Preventing Genocide. Denver: Paradigm Publishers.
Johnson, D. P. (2004). Overconfidence and war. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Kelman, H.C., & Hamilton, V.L. (1989). Crimes of Obedience: toward a social psychology of authority and
responsibility. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P.R. (Eds.). (2011). The Social Psychology of Morality. Washington: American
Psychological Association.
Staub, E. (2010). Overcoming Evil. New York: Oxford University Press.
Trivers, R. (2011). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. New
York: Viking Press.
Notes:
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Quotes
• Racist, white male superiority: published in Gould, S.J. (1980). "Women's Brains" in The Panda's
Thumb, New York, W.W. Norton. Pages 152-159.
• Holocaust denier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121402403.html
• Hilary Clinton as congenital liar: W. Saffire, 1996, Blizzard of lies, New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/opinion/essay-blizzard-of-lies.html
• The adaptive logic of self-deception: Trivers, R. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-
Deception in Human Life, New York, Viking/Penguin Press.
• Clinical liars: Dike et al. (2005). Pathological lying revisited. Journal of the American Academy of
Psychiatry and Law, 33 pp. 342-349; quote on p. 342
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 118
Chapter 4:
Wicked in waiting
The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they
be born, speaking lies.
⎯⎯ Bible, Psalm 53:8
Growing up is a lottery. No one has a say over their genes or their parents, including the environment that
is created on their behalf. For individuals raised in poverty, abused by parents or abandoned by them,
there may come a time when it is possible to purge the past, rise above it, and lay down new tracks.
Success in this endeavor depends upon biological potential and the environment’s toxicity. Though every
healthy human being acquires the same basic biological ingredients, individual differences in how our
biology expresses itself can either provide immunity against toxic environments or deep vulnerabilities.
The unlucky ones inherit genes that predispose to sensation-seeking and risk-taking, callous and
unemotional attitudes toward others, weak self-control, and narcissistic leanings. With this lottery ticket,
it takes little to trigger the mindset of an evildoer. And yet some resist. An impressive accumulation of
scientific evidence helps explain the source of these individual differences, including its role in sculpting
different personality profiles that either deviate greatly from societal norms or follow them to perfection.
What’s normal?
Much of our fascination with evil stems from the distinct impression that evildoers are anomalies. Their
actions are inhuman, unimaginable, rarely witnessed, and detrimental to our species’ survival. This
impression carries with it an assumption about what is expected or typical of our species, as well as what
is possible. It assumes that evildoers have thoughts, feelings, and desires that fall outside of the repertoire
of an average human being. Their actions are unimaginable because most human minds lack the capacity
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 119
to imagine butchering human bodies. Like so many simple claims that go unchallenged, we should be
puzzled by this one. We should ask: what’s normal?
The evolutionary history of each species’ brain does not provide a complete account of what the
brain can do. Consider again a topic from chapter 1: domesticated dogs and their ancestors, the wolves.
Though dogs live with humans, and are often raised by them, they never acquire a human language. In
this sense, the domesticated dog is just like the wolf. But what dogs can do, with greater facility than any
wild wolf, is understand a variety of human gestures such as pointing and the movement of our eyes. This
capacity emerged following a period of human domestication. Wolves were not part of this selective
regime. But, and this is the most interesting twist in the story, wolf puppies raised by human caretakers
develop into adults that can read pointing and looking extremely well. This tells us that even wolves
evolved the potential to read human gestures, but only human environments favor this skill. This tells us
that what animals express is not necessarily indicative of their potential. To uncover their potential, we
must alter the environment or wait for such changes to happen naturally.
When we ask What’s normal?, we are asking two questions: what is the evolved repertoire and
what is the evolved capacity? The evolved repertoire tells us something about the relationship between a
species’ biology and the environments that have shaped their behavior. The evolved capacity tells us
about a reservoir of behaviors that may only emerge in novel environments.
What’s normal human behavior? The same distinctions apply to us as to dogs and wolves, with
the extra complication that our species adds because of historical twists and turns orchestrated by legal,
political, ethical, religious, and medical points of view. History presents us with hundreds of cases where
an accepted normal mutated into abnormal, or where abnormal transformed into normal. During the
Italian Baroque ⎯⎯ a period of decadence that started in the late 16th century and ended in the early 18th
century ⎯⎯ some 500,000 boys were castrated in order to freeze their youthful voices for the enjoyment
of others. These castrati formed an essential part of music culture, of what people expected and wanted.
For many of these young boys, not only did castration end their reproductive careers, but often, their
lives.
As the 18th century drew to a close, so too did castration in the name of art. What was normal
then is perceived as abnormal and heinous today. The same story can be told for other sexual practices,
including female genital mutilation, circumcision, and homosexuality. In the United States,
homosexuality was considered a disease before the 1970s, with its own entry in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Thanks to an underground movement of gay psychiatrists and
the work of Evelyn Hooker who discovered that the manual’s classification entry was based entirely on
clinical interviews of gay prisoners, homosexuality has been freed from its jail sentence as a mental
disease ⎯⎯ as abnormal.
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 120
When clinicians diagnose individuals with a mental disorder, they are making a statement about
deviance, about what falls within and outside the range of normal mental states. Unfortunately, there are
no clear categories, no bright lines separating normal from abnormal or uncommon. As the distinguished
American psychologist William James noted, however, studying “the abnormal is the best way to
understand the normal.” Let’s follow this logic.
Consider the developmental disorder of autism. This disorder, typified by difficulties
understanding what others believe and feel, ranges from individuals who appear locked out of the world,
rocking back and forth to their own internal rhythm, to high functioning individuals such as Professor
Temple Grandin, who not only teaches college-level courses, but has done wonders as a spokesperson for
autism and for the animal welfare movement. This range already tells us that autism is represented by a
spectrum, once identified by purely behavioral measures, but joined today by genetic and neurobiological
markers. The genetic evidence is particularly helpful for explaining the observed variation. For example,
the MAOA gene, located on the X chromosome, is involved in the regulation of social behavior and has
different forms that map to differences in brain activity and stress physiology. The different forms
correspond to the number of copies of the genetic material. This copy number is, in turn, partially
responsible for the spectrum of autism observed, especially the degree of social dysfunction, including
stress and aggression. Once we admit to a spectrum, and begin to pinpoint the factors that push
individuals to stand on one end or the other, we must admit to admitting virtually everyone onto this
spectrum. All of us, at some point in our life, have lacked sensitivity to the feelings and beliefs of others.
All of us have been self-absorbed and locked out from the rest of the world. All of us have failed to
express empathy and compassion to others. All of us have been a bit abnormal in this sense. All of us
fall, on occasion, within the spectrum of autism as well as other disorders of the mind such as
psychopathy.
Like autism, psychopathy is not one neat and tidy disorder, but a spectrum. Diagnostically,
psychopaths are impulsive, narcissistic, and lacking in social emotions such as empathy, remorse, and
guilt. These behaviorally defined characteristics are complimented by genetic and neurobiological
markers, some pointing to risks in the pre-school years, and linked to the same MAOA gene noted above.
The spectrum that defines psychopaths ranges from hyper-smart, calculating, and powerful politicians to
low IQ, downtrodden, serial murderers. Everyone of us occasionally shows our psychopathic face: selfabsorbed,
impatient, manipulative, and uncaring. What is abnormal, then, is living with these
characteristics, all the time. Clinically diagnosed psychopaths, like clinically diagnosed individuals with
autism, have the characteristic traits as stable components of their personality. An honest clinician will
tell you, however, that stability is difficult to define, and so too are the essential traits. An honest brain
scientist will also tell you that, despite the observation that psychopaths have hyperactive dopamine brain
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 121
circuits that may drive sensation seeking, along with smaller frontal lobe circuits that may minimize their
sensitivity to punishment and the capacity for self-control, these differences are statistical. What
“statistical” means is that if you were to stack up all of the brains with hyperactive dopamine circuits and
smaller frontal lobes into one pile, most, but not all would be from psychopaths. You would also find
psychopaths in the pile of brains showing normal dopamine activity and average-sized frontal lobes.
These brain differences are interesting, but they are not yet like fingerprints, absolutely and uniquely
distinctive and diagnostic of a disorder. Such honesty reveals the challenges we face in answering the
simple question What’s normal?
Lawyers, judges and juries face the same problem as clinicians, often relying upon documents
such as the DSM to determine when someone has acted outside the range of normal behavior. But for
legal cases, there are two relevant layers of the normalcy problem. The first concerns whether the
supposed criminal was sane or insane. An insanity defense requires evidence of a disease or defect of the
mind. It requires evidence that the individual lacked the capacity to appreciate the criminal nature of the
act as well as the capacity to conform. This is the part that relies on the DSM, as well as clinicians who
can testify based on their expertise. The second concerns a more general understanding of what a
prototypical or normal human would or could do in a given situation. The idea seems straightforward
enough, but as I mentioned above, is only deceptively straightforward.
Crimes of passion provide a useful illustration of the challenges we face, especially with respect
to understanding how harm is ignited in the face of moral norms against it. Highlighting the truism that
love makes you crazy, the crime of passion defense is invoked for cases where, in the heat of the moment,
an individual finds and kills his or her spouse in bed with a lover. The defining feature of a crime of
passion is that it was not planned and most people faced with the same situation would act similarly,
unable to control their emotions.
The crime of passion defense seems straightforward. Like autism and psychopathy, however, it
too relies upon a diagnosis of what a prototypical or average person would do in the same situation. This
diagnosis requires an understanding of two difficult mental states: planning and self-control. Planning
involves imagining the future, time traveling to a new world, dreaming up what we might do and how we
might feel. We plan in the short and long term, filling up our mental sticky notes with to-do lists. Selfcontrol
enters into planning because what we imagine for ourselves ⎯⎯ what we desire ⎯⎯ is often
inappropriate or unethical because it harms others or ourselves. As noted in chapters 2 and 3, the capacity
to keep desire in check relies on moral engagement. Moral engagement requires self-control. Moral
disengagement requires denial in order to loosen the grip of self-control and enable desire to have its
way.
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When Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband John Bobbitt’s penis, she fulfilled her desire to harm
another. She carried out this gruesome act despite the moral and legal sanctions against it. But she did
not plan this act in advance, and nor did it occur in the heat of the moment, triggered by finding her
husband in bed with a lover. It followed in the wake of his repeated philandering, attempted rape and
psychological abuse. As an act, it fell between the cracks of a long-term plan and a reflexive response ⎯⎯
it was hatched on the night of the fatal attack, triggered by seeing a carving knife in the kitchen. Lorena
either lost self-control for that fatal moment or she was in complete control, aware of what she was about
to do and justified by her own moral convictions, believing that harming John was just deserts. John was
most definitely not innocent. The jury delivered a “not guilty” decision, appealing to a crime of passion
defense. This decision effectively excused Lorena’s harmful act as normal and justified given the
mitigating circumstances.
When we consider the nature of evil, we must pause to consider our own biases and prejudices
about what’s normal. We must ask about the human potential, about our evolved capacities and our
ability to behave in novel ways in novel environments. When we say that a person, group or nation is evil,
we are saying something important about human nature, about our capability as a species. We are saying
something important about the relationship between nature and nurture.
Evil eggs and corrosive coops
How much do career criminals cost? Estimates from the United States suggest that if you can prevent a
high risk child from entering this career, you save $1.5-2 million in costs of education, mental health, and
criminal fees. Educational facilities such as the Penikese Island School in Massachusetts, where I have
had the privilege of working, spend about $100,000 per student per year to keep high-risk teens off the
streets and out of jail. Based on statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately
100,000 individuals under the age of 18 years were arrested in 2007 for violent crimes ⎯⎯ murder, forcible
rape, and aggravated assault. If we had nurtured and educated these teenagers before they committed
such crimes, we would have saved close to $100,000,000,000. Violent crime prevention pays. How does a
career of violent crime start? Are there early warning signs? How early? How much starts with the egg
and how much with the coop in which it was raised?
Early scientific interests in this chicken and egg problem can be traced to the efforts of the Italian
physician and psychologist Cesare Lombroso. In 1876, he published his magnum opus The Criminal
Man. This was a serious, scholarly book aimed at understanding “whether there is a force in nature that
causes crime.” Based on measurements of both anatomical and psychological characteristics, Lombroso
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concluded that criminals were born not made. Their defining features were throwbacks to our
evolutionary ancestors, dehumanized by biological defects. Modern man was civilized and elegant.
Criminal man was barbaric, a savage with slanted forehead, jutting jaw, and excessively long arms.
Criminal man was more ape-like than human-like. Because the cause of these differences was biological,
Lombroso argued that a life of crime was inevitable. Change through rehabilitation was hopeless. To
protect society, these natural born criminals had to be taken out of society, either locked up or executed.
These ideas formed the basis of several eugenics’ movements, with the aim of weeding out the
undesirable, less than human elements of society, be they less intelligent, from a non-Caucasian racial
group, or from a culture with different religious beliefs.
Lombroso’s theory of criminality was soon rejected as scholars from a variety of different
disciplines unearthed its racial stereotypes and shoddy methods, including a failure to include the many
people with slanted foreheads, jutting jaws, and long arms who never committed crimes, and those with
statuesque anatomy who did. This initiated a general skepticism and even fear of biological explanations,
causing a swing in the opposite direction. Criminals were not born but made by corrupt societies.
Humans are not born with biologically encoded scripts for behaving with malice or virtue. Rather, we are
born with blank slates, waiting for society to inscribe its distinctive signature. So began a pendulous
swing from nature to nurture. Though the oscillation continues to this day, there is increasing
appreciation, perhaps especially in the arena of criminology, that both nature and nurture make important
contributions. This change comes, in part, from a far greater understanding of genetics, combined with
long term studies of how humans and other animals develop within environments that are either nurturing
or damaging.
Consider the MAOA gene that I mentioned in the last section. This gene produces an enzyme that
goes by the same shorthand of MAOA, or MonoAmine Oxidase A. MAOA is evolutionarily ancient,
shared with other animals, and has two different forms ⎯⎯ low and high ⎯⎯ that influence the level of
serotonin as well as the brain areas involved in social evaluation and emotional regulation. Early
evidence for the critical role of this gene in social behavior emerged from a study that knocked it out of
operation. If you knock out the MAOA gene in mice, they quickly become hyper-hyper-aggressive.
These genetically transformed mice have no capacity to regulate their social behavior. Consequently, all
interactions are treated as confrontational and handled by aggressive attacks. These results are consistent
with a large body of work in animals showing that heightened aggression and low levels of serotonin go
hand in hand. These results are also consistent with work on humans. In, 1993, the Dutch biologist Hans
Brunner analyzed the genetics of a large, extended family. Some individuals within this family were born
with a defect that silenced the operation of the MAOA gene; they were like the mice who had this gene
silenced. Relative to others in the family, these individuals had a pronounced history of violence,
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including murder, rape, and arson. Oddly, although this work provided one of the cleanest links between
genes and violence in humans, it slid under the radar of scientific attention, only to be resuscitated and
enriched about ten years later.
The behavioral geneticists Avshalom Caspi and Terry Moffitt studied a large population of young
boys over several years. Though boys and girls have the MAOA gene, its effect on behavior is easier to
study in boys because they have only one copy whereas girls have two, one for each of their two X
chromosomes. For each boy, Caspi and Moffitt collected information on the presence and frequency of
their antisocial behavior and whether they were raised by parents who were caring, mildly abusive, or
severely abusive. For each boy, they also noted whether they had the low or high expressing form of
MAOA.
Caspi and Moffitt’s results provided a textbook example of nature’s interaction with nurture. If
the parents were caring, the genes made no difference in their child’s personality or behavior. If the
parents were mildly abusive, the boys with the low activity form were nine times more likely to fight,
steal, bully, and defiantly break rules. For those boys with severely abusive parents and the low activity
form of MAOA, 85% developed into violent, delinquent criminals. What these findings tell us is that in
humans, it makes little difference which form of MAOA you have if you grow up with nurturing parents.
But if you grow up with abusive parents, your genes make all the difference in the world. Those with the
low expressing form are more likely than not to develop into delinquents, whereas those with the high
expressing form are more likely than not to develop immunity. By a double dose of bad luck, one shot
from the genes and one from the environment, some have a high probability of entering into the pool of
potential evildoers.
The German neuroscientist Andreas Meyer-Lindenburg took the genetic work one step further,
linking the particular form of MAOA up to differences in the brain. Those with relatively poor social
regulation and the low expressing form of MAOA had significantly smaller brains, specifically in regions
associated with the control of emotion and social behavior ⎯⎯ the amygdala, anterior cingulate, and
prefrontal cortex. These individuals also had less connectivity between these regions, harking back to the
importance of promiscuity both between humans and other animals, but also within our own species. Less
connectivity translates to less control by the frontal areas of the brain over emotion-relevant areas such as
the amygdala. When individuals with the low expressing form viewed angry or fearful facial expressions,
the emotionally-relevant brain areas went into hyper-drive, whereas those areas involved in regulating
emotions hibernated. Thus, in contrast with individuals who have the high expressing form of MAOA,
those with the low expressing form are overwhelmed by emotionally charged experiences, lacking the
mental brakes to stay cool. By luck of the draw, the low expressing form of MAOA builds a child that is
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 125
more likely to get angry and violent in the face of frustration and other emotional challenges, whereas the
high expressing form builds a child that is walled off, immune to the same challenges.
MAOA is crucial not only in long term human development, but also in everyday, ephemeral
social interactions. In a laboratory study, an experimenter offered subjects the opportunity to earn up to
$10 on a vocabulary quiz. Once they finished the quiz, they learned that an anonymous person in another
room either took some of their earnings or left it alone. With this information in hand, the quiz-taker
could either vindictively punish the person by giving them some hot sauce or they could cash out of the
game and recover the money lost. In other words, they could either vindictively burn their opponent or
recover their losses at no cost. In reality, there was no partner in the other room. When subjects with the
low expressing form of MAOA lost most of their earnings, they were far more likely to deliver the hot
sauce than those with the high expressing form; they were also most likely to deliver the highest amount
of the sauce. Like long-term parental abuse, even short-term provocation invoked in a laboratory
environment can cause those with the low expressing form of MAOA to act out and attack.
As with all genes that have different forms, the number of individuals with the low expressing
form of MAOA varies by population, including different ethnic and culturally identified groups.
Caucasian and Hispanic males show some of the lowest frequencies at 34 and 29 % respectively, whereas
Maori, Pacific Islander, and Chinese males show the highest at 56, 61, and 77% respectively. In a study of
over 1000 men, individuals with the low expressing form of MAOA were more likely to be in violent
gangs, and once in gangs, were more likely to use guns and knives than individuals with the high
expressing form. Variation in the frequency of these two forms is interesting as it provides the signature
handiwork of natural selection. When the frequency of one form goes up, the most likely explanation is
that this form benefits the individual carriers. When the frequency goes down, there is a hidden cost. In
light of this teeter-tottering of frequencies, the Maori are of interest. As celebrated by many New
Zealanders today, the Maori were a highly adventurous and warring people. Individuals who took risks
and fiercely defended their resources were heroes. Heroes may have been carriers of the low expressing
form of MAOA. Heroes often leave more offspring, who were also carriers of the low expressing form.
In the Maori environment, selection may well have favored this form of the gene. The important point is
that different environments will favor different frequencies of the two forms of MAOA. This helps
explain both the cause of individual differences and the challenges we face in confronting cultures of
violence that are fueled by nature and nurture.
Many other labs have followed up on Caspi and Moffitt’s long term, developmental study. Most
find the same relationship between the MAOA gene and antisocial behavior. Others add to this account
by showing how different genes and early appearing physiological differences contribute to a highly
aggressive and antisocial starting state. In one study, the German psychologist Alexander Strobel put
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subjects in a brain scanner and invited them to play a bargaining game where they could punish someone
who acted unfairly to them ⎯⎯ personal revenge ⎯⎯ or punish someone who acted unfairly to someone
else ⎯⎯ impersonal punishment. For each subject, Strobel also collected information on a gene called
COMT Met. This gene has three different forms, linked to differences in activity level in the frontal lobe
of the brain, which are linked to differences in the levels of dopamine, which are linked to differences in
the experience of reward. Given the different forms of COMT Met, at least part of what we experience as
the feeling of reward or gratification was determined by our parents, and our parent’s parents, and their
parent’s parents, all the way back to our ape-like cousins who evolved this gene.
When Strobel looked at the brain scans of his subjects, he found that the same circuitry was
engaged for personal revenge and impersonal punishment, with significant activity in the striatum ⎯⎯ a
reward area ⎯⎯ as well as in the insula ⎯⎯ an area involved in the feeling of disgust. When we detect an
injustice, we feel disgusted, a feeling that may motivate our desire for retribution. The striatum finishes
off the process, rewarding us for our punitive response, and wiping out the negative feeling of disgust.
Importantly, individuals with the high expressing form of COMT Met, and thus, higher levels of
dopamine, showed stronger activation in the striatum, and were more likely to punish those who act
unfairly. Strobel suggests that those with the high expressing form punished more because they
anticipated a higher level of reward. If this explanation is right, it has profound consequences for how we
think about individual participation in the policing of norms and the honey hits associated with
aggression. Some people will have a natural bias to shy away from punishment, not because they fail to
see the importance of ratting out cheaters, but because they don’t anticipate feeling good about it. Others
will be prone to punish even the most minor infractions because they feel empowered and good about it.
Those who are empowered to punish because it feels good have forged a stronger association between
aggression and reward. Unbeknownst to these individuals, they started life with a bias, one that colored
their willingness to harm others. This bias is joined by many others that I discuss in the next few sections.
The take home message is that if you are born male, endowed with certain genetic variants such
as the low activity form of MAOA, and experience physical and psychological abuse by your parents, the
odds of delinquency are frighteningly high. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you are born
male, have the high activity variant of the MAOA gene, and experience physical and psychological abuse
by your parents, you are vaccinated by nature against the harms of your unfortunate nurture. The
problem, of course, is that you have no say over which endowment you get, nor over the kinds of parents
you receive.
One of the reasons I have worked through this case study of genetic constraints and
environmental sculpting is to provide an antidote to the often polarized views that have dominated much
of the historical and psychological literature on evil. Many of the earliest, and most famous psychological
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experiments were related in one way or another to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts about Adolf Eichmann and
the fact that good people are capable of horrific things: the banality of evil. Hiding behind every average
Joe is a person equipped with an engine of malice. Banality is the veil of evil. Thus, the American
psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that normal people were capable of shocking innocent others when
an authority figure told them to do so; of course, there were no shocks, but the subjects believed they
were real. Similarly, the American psychologists Solomon Asch and Philip Zimbardo showed that
normal people followed group attitudes and instructions, bleating like mindless sheep, no reflection, no
critical thinking, no concern about the consequences of their actions. In Zimbardo’s study ⎯⎯ the famous
Stanford prison experiments ⎯⎯ run of the mill undergraduates playing the role of prison guards turned
into little dictators, mentally and physically abusing their run of the mill undergraduates playing the role
of prisoners. Together, these studies seemed to support a blank slate view of the mind, a tablet waiting for
inscription by the local culture, with no constraints on the written matter.
A closer look at many of these studies reveals far more variation in how individuals responded,
suggesting that differences in their genetic make-up and personal experience either facilitated their
willingness to follow authority and ideology or prevented it. Many subjects in both the Milgram and
Zimbardo studies refused to follow the orders or rules of the game. Those who refused tended to identify
more with the victim and less with the authority figure or ideology. This suggests important differences in
the capacity to experience empathy and compassion for another. Studies by the cognitive neuroscientist
Esse Viding show that by the pre-school years, some children have a diminished capacity for empathy,
expressing a deeply callous and unemotional character. These children exhibit severe conduct problems,
especially violence. These children lack remorse and an awareness of others’ distress. They are cold,
heartless kids. If they have a twin, they are more likely to share this callous-unemotional personality than
two unrelated children, revealing the trademark of a powerful genetic engine. More boys than girls fall on
the high end of this callous-unemotional scale ⎯⎯ where high translates to colder and more callous. Those
who score highest on the scale engage in more direct physical bullying than those who score lower. High
scorers lack the skills to modulate their behavior following direct or anticipated punishment. These
individuals also show reduced activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is critically involved in
regulating emotion, especially the assignment of a positive or negative value on our actions and
experiences. These individual differences persist into adulthood. These are the kind of individual
differences that can explain why some followed Milgram and Zimbardo’s instructions to perfection, while
others resisted, exerting self-control.
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The sweetness of control
When humans and other animals travel the road to excess, whether for food consumption, violence,
power, or sex, it is either because they gave in to an in-the-moment impulsive itch or because a history of
losing self-control turned into an addictive habit. What causes us to lose our sense of moderation, allow
our mental brakes to slip, and give in to temptation? What causes our preferences to inconsistently and
irrationally shift over time, allowing seductive offerings to win? If you are the eminent social
psychologist Roy Baumeister who has contributed fundamental insights into the nature of evil, the answer
is simple: sugar. Love it. Want it. Need it.
When we work hard, focusing on a difficult problem or trying to figure out the best decision,
exhaustion strikes. Part of our exhaustion comes from the fact that we have depleted a critical resource:
sugar, or more precisely, glucose. When the availability of this resource diminishes, we also lose selfcontrol.
This is why the loss of self-control has a cycle that follows the time of day, with the greatest
losses occurring late rather than early: diet breakers are more likely to pig out in the evening than early in
the morning; shoppers are more likely to buy impulsively as the day moves on; impulsive crimes and
relapses of addiction are evening affairs; judges are more likely to dole out punishment at the end of a day
in court than when they start a new day. Dozens of experiments show that if you have to exert selfcontrol
in one context it taxes your capacity to exert self-control in another. For example, if you ask
subjects to avoid laughing while watching a comedy routine, avoid thinking about a white bear, or avoid
eating chocolates now to have radishes later, these same subjects will squeeze a hand grip for a shorter
period of time than subjects who never contended with the various self-control tasks. When you deplete
your personal resources, you lose your grip, opening yourself up to binge eating, unnecessary violence,
sexual promiscuity, and drug relapses.
How do we know that glucose is responsible? If you give people a milkshake with real sugar
before they have to take a hard test involving self-control, they do better than if you give them a
milkshake with an artificial sweetener. If you first make people take a test that taxes their attention, and
causes their glucose to drop, they do worse on a subsequent test, including the hand grip squeezing test. In
an extraordinary series of experiments and observations, the American psychologist Nathan DeWall
found that subjects who drank lemonade with glucose were less likely to respond aggressively to an insult
than subjects who drank lemonade with artificial sweetener; individuals with diabetes ⎯⎯ who have
difficulty regulating blood glucose, and thus have less of it ⎯⎯ reported higher levels of aggression on a
questionnaire than non-diabetics; within the United States, those states with higher numbers of diabetics
showed higher crime rates; and countries with a higher frequency of a genetic disorder that lowers
glucose levels showed higher killing rates both in and out of war.
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To accept DeWall's striking results, it is necessary to accept one connection between self-control
and aggression and a second between glucose and self-control:
SELF-CONTROL DOWN � AGGRESSION UP
GLUCOSE DOWN � SELF-CONTROL DOWN
That aggression often follows from a loss of control is backed up by considerable evidence, including
clinical studies that link lack of inhibition in psychopaths to extreme violence. Also of interest is the fact
that impulsive aggression is more likely to arise when individuals are drunk than sober. Alcohol, as we all
know, lowers our inhibitions, but also lowers glucose in both the brain and body. Though scientists such
as Baumeister and DeWall have not yet worked out in detail how glucose is used or replenished in the
context of self-control, there are far too many studies using different methods and subjects to ignore this
relationship. Minimally, these studies indicate that we should think about self-control like a resource,
something that can be used up and replenished, something that can be depleted, tipping the scale toward
violence.
One of the interesting implications of DeWall’s work is that individual differences in glucose
availability are coupled with individual differences in self-control. Diabetes shows a high level of
heritability, meaning that some individuals are more likely to develop this problem than others simply
based on what genes they receive from their parents. The prevalence of diabetes is on the rise in many
countries, with some estimates suggesting that by 2025, there will be 325,000,000 diabetics world wide,
more than double current estimates. The genetic disorder that lowers glucose levels arises because of a
deficiency in a key enzyme, glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase. This is one of the most common
enzyme deficiencies in the world, affecting over 400,000,000 people, and in many cases, triggered by the
consumption of fava beans. As with variation in the frequency of MAOA, so too can variation in this
glucose-related gene be subject to selection pressures, especially given its link to violence. Once again,
we see nature and nurture contributing to individual variation and cultural differences in our capacity to
harm others.
Together, these observations of glucose-related disorders speak to a disconcerting reality: we are
born with inherent differences in the availability of key resources guiding self-restraint. Some of us start
off life better equipped to control our frustrations, wait for future gains, and moderate our temper. These
early differences can have long lasting and disastrous effects later in life, a point supported by a study that
began forty years ago with four year-old children presented with a marshmallow.
The American social psychologist Walter Mischel recruited four year old children to his
laboratory and sat them down at a table with two objects: a marshmallow and a bell. He then told each
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child that he was going to leave the room. If they wanted to eat the marshmallow, they only had to ring
the bell. But, as Mischel informed them, if they waited for his return, he would bring them more
marshmallows. Mischel took out his stopwatch and recorded how long each child waited before ringing
the bell.
Some children rang the bell almost immediately, leaving Mischel no time to leave the room.
Others waited. This isn’t surprising. Some children are impulsive, others are impatient, and this shows up
early in life. What is surprising is that these early appearing personality types held steadfast, impacting
later life decisions and actions. The more impatient types were more likely to be involved in juvenile
delinquency, have poor grades, abuse drugs, get divorced, and lose their jobs. For women who developed
eating disorders, those who were more patient were more likely to be anorexic, whereas those who were
more impulsive were more likely to be bulimic. When the American developmental psychologist B.J.
Casey put these now 40-somethings inside a brain scanner, the patient ones showed stronger activation in
the prefrontal areas of the brain when viewing happy and fearful faces, revealing stronger self-control
over their feelings. In contrast, when the impatient ones viewed the same stimuli, not only was there a
weaker response in the prefrontal region but a stronger response in the ventral striatum when viewing
happy faces. The striatum, as noted earlier, is involved in the experience of reward. For the impatient
types, seeing something positive is like eating candy, something that is hard to ignore. The patient types
regulate this feeling, transforming the heat of the moment into a cool experience. The impatient types are
overwhelmed by this feeling, giving into temptation. This work adds to the genetic evidence reviewed
earlier, showcasing both the importance of individual differences in self-control, and the stability of these
differences as distinctive personality types.
Individual differences in self-control are also relevant to levels of recidivism in youths who have
committed a crime, and thus tie us back to the beginning of this chapter and the costs of a career criminal.
Career criminals are individuals who repeatedly commit crimes. They lack self-control. This is important
for judges, juries and society as we want to know in advance who is most likely to commit another crime
if we release them back out onto the streets. The American sociologist Matt DeLisi presented a selfcontrol
survey to approximately 800 juvenile youths, ages 12-17 years, each with a criminal record.
Those who scored one standard deviation from the mean on this survey, and thus were more impulsive
than most, were five times more likely to become career criminals. Five times. Self-control on its own
accounted for about 80% of the variation in recidivism among these delinquents; the remaining 20% was
accounted for by factors that one might think would be much more important, including mental health,
education, gender, and socioeconomic background. As DeLisi concludes, these results suggest that
measures of self-control provide a reliable predictor of the likelihood of repeating a crime. They provide a
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 131
measure of risk, a factor that both juvenile and adult courts should be using to determine their sentencing,
especially the individual’s future dangerousness.
Individual differences in glucose metabolism, together with relative differences in brain activity,
lead to stable differences in self-control. But there’s more, both luck of the draw genetic effects and
clinical distortions. Recall that the low expressing form of the MAOA gene results in lower levels of
serotonin which, in turn, leverages less control over aggressive impulses. There is another gene ⎯⎯
SLC6A4 ⎯⎯ that also comes in two forms and regulates the level of serotonin. The short form of this gene
gives you less serotonin, is commonly found in pathological gamblers and psychopaths ⎯⎯ two heavily
male-biased disorders that are associated with impoverished impulse control. Psychopaths also have
relatively smaller frontal lobes , especially within a region that has a high density of serotonin neurons.
Psychopathy is joined by a family of impulse control disorders that also implicate dysfunction of the
serotonin system, including kleptomania (stealing), pyromania (burning), trichotillomania (hair pulling),
and oniomania (shopping). Like glucose, serotonin plays a lead role in our capacity for self-control.
When serotonin is sidelined from the performance, any number of impulsivity problems may emerge.
What I have said thus far is only a partial accounting of the biological ingredients that figure into
our capacity for self-control. What this partial recipe tell us is that regardless of the situation, some
individuals are inoculated against the pull of authority and group ideology and others are susceptible. If
you missed the inoculation clinic in utero, you are more susceptible to temptations and excesses,
including excessive violence. This is important for our interpretation of the real world and of the famous
psychological experiments by Milgram, Zimbardo, and others in which seemingly good people carried
out unambiguously horrid things. Some individuals carry a genetic skeleton that resists the push and pull
of charismatic leaders and powerful isms. These people will not be pushed into doing bad things. Others,
faced with the exact same situation, will find their skeleton buckling, tempted to take risks and lash out
when the going gets tough.
Invisible risks
Several years ago, Ira Glass, the brilliant radio show host of This American Life, delved into the topic of
superheroes. One episode focused on a question that has become part of my repertoire for dinner parties,
especially those in need of a conversational catalyst: if you could become a superhero with one power,
which would you take ⎯⎯ the ability to fly or to be invisible? Most people have a rapid-fire, confident
response to this question, while others reflect a bit, often engaging themselves in a public debate over
their conflicted views. What is interesting about people’s answer to this question, independently of
whether they pick flying or invisibility, is that they rarely talk about using their power to do good in the
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world! The flyers talk about how cool it would be to vacation anywhere in the world, zip to work or
school, or have fun soaring like an eagle. The invisibility types talk about sneaking into stores and taking
clothes or music they like, eavesdropping on conversations, and playing tricks on family members and
friends. What is even more interesting about these particular answers is how they divide into pure
hedonism ⎯⎯ flying ⎯⎯ and pure vice ⎯⎯ invisibility. With invisibility you can take risks at no cost, except
for the cost that soon becomes apparent to many of these newly donned superheroes: even if they don’t
get caught, they still did something bad, morally bad. This ratchets up their guilt. With this realization,
and a dip into the dark side, comes an about face, with some picking flying instead of invisibility. Rarely
do people stick with invisibility, but see how they might deploy their power for virtuous purposes. Rarely
do these superheroes realize that they can be real heroes, using their invisibility to gain covert information
about terrorist organizations, elicit drug traders, pedophilic priests, or abusive parents ⎯⎯ minus the risks.
In real life, there are risks associated with every decision, some clear from the start and others
only clear in hindsight. As with self-control, a growing body of evidence shows that there are individual
differences in risk-taking: some are risk-averse, some risk-prone, and some seemingly risk-blind, unaware
that they are taking risks at all. Some of these differences are evident early in life. Some of these
differences are strongly associated with crime later in life. Some of these differences provide insights into
the invisible risks that individuals and societies confront, risks that can cause great harms.
Research on clinical populations with antisocial disorders, most notably those with a clinical
diagnosis of psychopathy, reveals a major cause of their high risk, costly, and violent behavior: a failure
to experience fear, anxiety, or stress in response to highly evocative images and sounds. In contrast with
healthy populations, psychopaths are emotionally blasé about the things in the world that can cause harm
or result in punishment. The problem lies in the fact that psychopaths, both adults and those identified as
candidates early in childhood, fail to learn about the dangers in life. Their failure to learn is caused by a
reduction in size and activity of two critical and connected brain areas: a region of the frontal cortex and
the amygdala. When this system works efficiently, it allows individuals to learn about the sounds, smells,
and sights that are associated with bad things in the world. When this system works well, individuals
learn to avoid antisocial, immoral, and illegal acts by developing anxiety and fear over the possibility of
punishment and personal injury. When this system works poorly, as is the case in psychopaths,
individuals act as if there are no dangers or risks of punishment ⎯⎯ a disposition that enables inappropriate
actions. But psychopathy covers a broad spectrum, with problems that all of us confront at some point in
our lives, some of us even repeatedly. This is important as it forces us to look at non-clinical populations
for the causes of individual differences in risk-taking, especially our reactivity to dangerous events.
Studies carried out over several decades, in a wide variety of cultures, reveal that children begin
life with distinctive temperaments. Some are mellow, blasé about events that are startling to many.
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 133
Others are high strung and reactive, responding with heightened fear to the same startling events. Others
fall somewhere in between these two poles. What is surprising is the fact those with the flattest response
to evocative images and sounds are the most likely to become violent delinquents in young adulthood.
In a remarkable study, Adrian Raine and his colleagues presented 1,795 three year olds with two
different sounds while recording the sweatiness of their palms; the sweatier the palms, the greater the
stress and fear. One sound was always associated with a second and highly aversive noise, while the
second sound was always played alone. When you pair a neutral sound, such as a pure tone, with a nasty
sound, simply hearing the pure tone will make your skin crawl; the pure tone predicts what is coming, and
what is coming is not pleasant. When Raine revisited these same individuals twenty years later, those with
serious criminal records involving drug abuse, dangerous driving violations, or violence, had the driest
palms at the age of three years. In another study, focusing specifically on violence, Raine measured the
sweatiness of a different group of three year olds and then looked at their aggressiveness five years later.
Once again, those with the driest palms at three years were the most aggressive at eight years. In the
absence of a system that enables individuals to learn about danger, the brain and body act as if they were
shrouded in an invisibility cloak, blind to the risks of crossing either moral or legal lines.
Raine’s findings fit well with the marshmallow study. In the same way that those who were
most impatient in the pre-school years were also most likely to exhibit signs of delinquency in early
adulthood, so too were those who were most blasé about fearful stimuli as children most likely to exhibit
delinquency in adulthood. Both studies reveal the stability of personality traits. Both studies suggest that
at the level of groups of individuals, as opposed to specific individuals, the blasé-impatient types
represent a greater threat to our welfare. The point about groups is important. These studies do not allow
us to look at an individual’s record and conclude that because he could only wait for 3 seconds before
eating the lone marshmallow, and almost fell asleep when presented with loud banging noises, that he is
without doubt headed for a life of crime. We also can’t conclude that because patience and reactivity to
fearful stimuli can be measured as early as three years old, that these personality traits are entirely genetic
and fixed. In fact, other studies carried out by Raine show that if you ramp up the nutrition, exercise, and
mental stimulation of children between the ages of 3-5 years, you can reduce adult criminal offenses by
35%. What we can conclude from these findings is that there are significant individual differences that
affect who is willing to take risks and who isn’t. We can conclude that there is a strong biological
component that constrains the individual’s options. We can conclude that those who start early in life
without an understanding of the dangers in the world, act as if they live in a risk-free world. Molecular
biologists provide an increasingly precise understanding of how these individual differences start,
pointing to genes that bias some individuals to take extreme risks, including the risk of violating social
norms and laws by violently attacking another human being.
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 134
There are many situations where taking a risk pays off, whether we think of stealth military
operations, chancy shots in the final seconds of a basketball game, or significant investments in an up and
coming stock option. Playing it safe pays off. But those who stick their necks out and take a chance, may
bring home significant gains. It is because of these competing strategies and potential payoffs that
evolutionary biologists have imagined that selection could maintain both personality types within a
population ⎯⎯ a point noted earlier for the MAOA and glucose-related genes. If selection has worked in
this way, then there must be genetic variation that allows for both strategies. To date, the strongest
evidence comes from a family of genes associated with the regulation of dopamine, with the memorable
acronyms of DAT1, DRD2 and DRD4; each of these genes is associated with different forms, each form
associated with different levels of dopamine. Recall from chapter 2 that dopamine plays an essential role
in our experience of reward, including how motivated we are to get it and what we anticipate based on our
understanding of the situation ⎯⎯ have we been rewarded in the past, how often, and how much? The idea
here is that those who carry genes that output a higher level of dopamine may weight rewards more
heavily and thus, show risk-blindness; for these individuals, the eye is on the prize, not the path or
obstacles to this prize.
Across a number of studies, results show that variation in the expression of these genes is
associated with high-risk, low self-control behaviors, including pathological gambling, substance abuse,
sensation seeking, and financial investments. For example, in two separate studies, individuals with
different variants of the DRD4 gene played a financial investment game involving real money. In one,
designed by Joan Chiao, subjects decided to invest in either a risky asset with variable returns or a riskless
asset with consistent returns. In the second study, the Swedish economist Ana Dreber and the American
anthropologist Corin Apicella allowed subjects to either walk away with an initial starting pot of money,
or to invest some of it in a risky asset. Those with the DRD4 variant that expresses higher levels of
dopamine were more likely to pursue the risky investment. What this work reveals is that part of the
variation we observe among people who make risky investments, drink too much alcohol, and gamble
with their income, is due to variation in the dopamine family of genes. These are hidden risks that come
to life thanks to molecular biologist’s microscope. What also comes to life is the fact that these same
genes are relevant to violence, causing some to strike out even though there are significant risks and
terrible consequences.
In several studies, using an American health data base of several thousand adolescents, results
consistently show a relationship between particular variants of the dopamine genes and violence. For
example, the sociologist Guang Guo examined the relationship between violent delinquency ⎯⎯ involving
use of guns and knives ⎯⎯ and variation in DRD2 and DAT1 among 2,5000 individuals ages 12-23 years.
DRD2 was of particular interest because medical records and clinical trials reveal that administering
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 135
haloperidol ⎯⎯ a DRD2 dopamine antagonist ⎯⎯ helps control aggression in psychotic patients. Guo found
that levels of violence were about twice as high for one variant of the DRD2 gene than others, and about
20% higher for a particular variant of the DAT1 gene. These genetic variants cause differences in
dopamine, which cause differences in expected and experienced reward, which cause differences in
perceived risk, which cause differences in the odds of getting in a fight and harming others. These are not
genes for aggression, violence or evil. There are no such genes. Rather, they are genes that change our
perception of risk. Because risk is related to all sorts of decisions, these genes can affect the odds that we
directly harm others. They are part of the story of individual differences, and part of the story of why
some are more likely to engage in evildoing.
Everything I have discussed thus far focuses on actions, on how the psychology of desire and
denial combine to fuel behaviors that lead, directly or indirectly, to excessive harms. I have also explained
how different biological ingredients predispose us toward different degrees of self-control, and thus,
differences in our ability to omit particular actions. This sense of omission is a virtue, a sign of resisting
temptation. But can omissions be a sign of vice, of resisting an action that is called for? Can omissions
ever reach such a scale that we would consider individuals or societies as evil omitters?
The sin of sloth.
What’s worse: 1) giving a lethal overdose to someone suffering from an incurable disease or allowing this
person to die by removing life support? 2) pushing someone in front of a runaway truck to stop the truck
and save the lives of five others or allowing someone to walk in front of the truck instead of warning
them? 3) pouring a toxic chemical into your competitor’s drink in order to make him sick or allowing
your competitor to drink the toxic chemical that was placed on the table by someone else? Even though
all of these situations seem quite bad, most people have a gut feeling that the actions are worse than the
omissions. They also feel that when we omit life support, fail to warn someone of a runaway truck, or
remain silent about a toxic drink, that we are less responsible for the consequences that unfold. Dozens of
studies, using hundreds of different examples, and thousands of subjects, support what our gut expresses:
we are captive to an omission effect. Even when we understand that the consequences are precisely the
same ⎯⎯ the suffering patient dies, the truck kills the person, the toxic chemical makes the competitor sick
⎯⎯ and so too are the person’s goals and intentions ⎯⎯ eliminate suffering, save five people, take out the
competitor ⎯⎯ we are seduced to believe that action is worse than omission or that doing harm to another
is worse than allowing harm to occur.
The omission effect lays bare a tension between unconscious, spontaneous intuition and
conscious, reflective thought. On the one hand, there are potentially good reasons why we evolved this
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 136
intuition. It is a heuristic or rule of thumb that may be right much of the time. When I do something, as
long as it is not by accident, my intentions and goals are more clear cut than when I fail to do something
or allow it to happen. If I punch you and your arm bruises, the causality is clear: I caused your arm to
bruise. I am responsible for this harm. I should be punished. If I stand by as someone is about to punch
you, but don’t deflect the punch when I easily could have, it feels odd to say that I caused your arm to
bruise. It also seems strange to say that I am responsible and should be punished. By not deflecting the
punch, I allowed the harm to occur. I could have prevented it from happening, but I am not obliged to. As
social creatures, we have been designed to pick up on cues that reliably classify people into friends and
enemies. Friends intentionally help us while enemies intentionally harm us. Actions showcase our
intentions better than omissions.
The omission effect also makes sense in terms of personal responsibility. Not only do our guts tell
us that actors are more responsible for outcomes than omitters, but our guts also tell us that it is hard to
hold others responsible for their omissions. As I sit and write these words, I am committing heinous acts
of omission: I am not currently giving money to any charities, am not scheduled to teach in the dozens of
refugee camps around the world, and am not volunteering for any of the peace keeping armies sponsored
by the UN. I am also guilty of many other minor crimes of omission, including the failure to consistently
give my change to homeless individuals, and the failure to spend time in homes for the elderly and
mentally handicapped. As I sit, I rack up countless harms of omission. It is hopefully the absurdity of this
comment that shows why there is a fracture in the arm that connects omissions to responsibility. In a large
scale society, it is impossible for us to hold people responsible for their omissions. There are far too many
reasons, often good ones, why people don’t act. The universe of reasons for acting is smaller.
If the omission effect arises because it is virtually impossible to hold omitters responsible in a
large scale society, than what about small scale societies including the hunter-gathers of our past, and the
tiny hamlets and villages that dot many countries, both developed and developing? When the number of
people that you know and interact with is small, does the omission effect vanish? In a fish bowl
community, you should be able to hold all of the other fish responsible for their actions and omissions
because you know what they are up to. To explore this idea, the psychologist Linda Abarbanell and I ran
a study with a rural, small scale Mayan population, living in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Every
individual listened to a reading of a moral dilemma. Each dilemma described an action or an omission
that resulted in harming one person, but saving the lives of many. Subjects judged the moral
permissibility of the action or omission.
Unlike thousands of adults on the internet who judged similar dilemmas, as well as other Mayans
living in a city, individuals in this small scale Mayan population perceived no moral difference between
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 137
actions and omissions. The omission effect evaporated, with the moral weight of an action perceived to
be on a par with an omission.
The Mayan study is but one example. It suggests some flexibility in our perception of actions and
omissions, and shows how cultural differences can create individual differences. When our social world is
relatively small and circumscribed, we can keep tabs on everyone. By keeping tabs, we can hold others
responsible for their actions and their omissions. As the American psychologists Jon Haidt and Jonathan
Baron have shown, this psychology can be recreated in the laboratory by creating scenarios in which the
individuals are either unfamiliar or familiar. When there is a relationship between the individuals ⎯⎯
family, friends, team members ⎯⎯ and thus, some degree of familiarity, the omission effect weakens.
The omission effect is not an obligatory state of the human mind. It is a common tendency, a way
that our brains lean, especially in unfamiliar contexts. In patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, the
omission effect is as strong as it is in healthy subjects, except for familiar cases of harm that are directly
relevant to them, such as the excessive washing behavior that is the trademark of this clinical disorder.
The fact that certain situations can cause us to lean in different directions has important policy
implications: even when corporations, institutions, or other organizations grow large, we should always
segregate these masses into smaller divisions, and make the issues personally relevant. Every member of
one division should hold all others within its division responsible or accountable. Further, efforts should
be made to foster familiarity across divisions, enabling not only a level of responsibility but of respect
and trust. By recreating the psychology of small scale societies, and making potential harms relevant, we
may help bypass the omission effect, allowing us to hold people responsible for their omissions. This, in
turn, may reduce the number of individuals who live as passive bystanders. Familiarity and relevance
may well be the necessary catalysts for converting bystanders into active whistle blowers, defenders, and
rescuers.
When bystanders remain passive, watching the world go by, it is often because they believe that
their actions won’t make a difference or think that the costs of heroism are too high. This is, again, an
issue of responsibility. It raises the question of when we ought to act. The distinguished Australian
philosopher Peter Singer has spent a lifetime pushing this issue in the context of charitable donations,
culminating most recently in his book The Life You Can Save. The key idea, taken from a utilitarian
perspective where outcomes as opposed to rules or principles motivate our moral actions, is that we ought
to give a fraction of our incomes to those lacking basic access to food, shelter and health care. Standing
by as bystanders when there are 1.4 billion people in a state of abject poverty is morally wrong. The logic
seems perfectly reasonable, especially given the fact that humanitarian organizations have helped reduce
the number of people living in poverty by .5 billion within the last 20 years. But then we learn of another
Peter Singer idea: if the three richest men alive today ⎯⎯ Carlos Slim Helu, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 138
⎯⎯ worth a total of 153.5 billion dollars, were to give up one third of their net worth, they could solve
world hunger. On a personal level, they would barely notice this donation. With this knowledge, why
should I bother to give a penny? This is one example of apathy regarding our motivation to help others.
What propels individuals to shift from passive bystanders who can allow harm to occur to active
contributors?
Classic studies by the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane reveal the
ingredients for bystander action. Whether it is helping someone having a seizure, being molested, or in
danger of suffocation from smoke, we are more likely to help when alone than when in a group. We are
also more likely to help when we recognize the situation as a crisis and think that there are plausible
solutions. These are all characteristics of the situation. There are also characteristics of the individual
bystander, including their level of compassion and empathy toward others, their capacity to identify with
the victim, and their self-control. For example, people who intervene in cases of child abuse, as opposed
to the passive bystanders, are more likely to have been abused as children, more likely to perceive a
solution, more likely to feel responsibility to intervene, and more likely to experience the weight of guilt
for not intervening. We are back to individuals differences. We are back to the egg and coop, and their
joint contribution to helping or harming others. We are back to the established genetic differences in
compassion, risk-taking, and self-control that combine with a history of experience to create some who sit
and watch and others who actively participate.
We are more likely to pardon bystanders because we tend to see omissions as less bad than
actions, and omitters as less responsible for the consequences than actors. This is a dangerous effect.
Bystanders are part of the equation of evil. As noted by the American genocide scholar and psychologist,
Ervin Staub, bystanders start out as passive players on the side lines, but are rapidly transformed into
perpetrators. The transformation starts with the challenge of maintaining passivity while watching other
humans suffer; to maintain this observer status requires suppressing empathy for the sufferers, while
recognizing that they are in the minority and you, the bystander, are with the majority. To avoid feeling
guilty for not feeling empathy, bystanders distance themselves even further from the victims. Distancing
is an adaptive response as any association with the victims could put a bystander in harm’s way. But like
so many other psychological states discussed in this book, distancing leads to dehumanization.
Dehumanization leads to moral disengagement and greater justification for the perpetrators. Justification
lends cheering support for violence. This is the final transforming step, from passive bystander to active
participant.
Recall that on my account of evil, evildoers either have a desire to cause harm directly or desire
something good, recognizing that it will cause harm indirectly. This is true of actions and omissions. For
example, keeping a secret, even if pressured into spilling the beans, is a good thing because it upholds a
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 139
promise, and thus, the relationship. But if keeping the secret results in innocent lives lost or ruined, then
this is a bad thing. Not telling ⎯⎯ an omission ⎯⎯ indirectly can cause harm. This is the situation that has
confronted the Catholic Church over the past twenty years.
During the tenures of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, some 4,000 priests sexually abused
some 10,000 innocent children. This is unquestionably an underestimate. This is excessive harm. Popes
John Paul II and Benedict XVI , together with their cardinals and bishops, assumed the role of bystanders.
They were aware of the rampant cases of child rape among the clergy. They could have acted. Their
omissions are archetypal examples of the sin of sloth. By omission, they are responsible for excessive
harm and should be held legally accountable. This process has begun as evidenced by the decision in
October of 2011 to indict Bishop Robert Finn for failing to report a priest who took pornographic
photographs of young girls. Though Finn was only charged with a misdemeanor, this case opens opens a
legal floodgate. It is an opening that should allow prosecutors, around the globe, to indict bishops,
cardinals, and the Pope for evil omissions. It should empower the parents and children who have suffered
to rise up and demand justice for allowing excessive harm to occur. It should cause everyone to express
outrage over the fact that allowing priests to rape innocent children perpetuates a cycle of pedophiles as
those who have been abused are likely to abuse others. The leaders of the church have not only commited
a crime of omission, but have helped perpetuate a culture of harm.
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 140
Endnotes: Chapter 4
Recommended Books
Chagnon, N. (1996). Yanomamo. 5th Edition. Harcourt Brace.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. (2009). Worse Than War. New York: Public Affairs.
Jones, A. (2010). Genocide: a comprehensive introduction. New York: Routledge.
Kiernan, B. (2007). Blood and Soil: A world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to
Darfur. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, Inc.
McCullough, M. (2008). Beyond Revenge: The evolution of the forgiveness instinct. Jossey-Bass, New
York
Singer, P. (2010). The Life You Can Save. New York: Random House.
Wittenbrink, B. & Schwarz, B. (2007). Implicit Measures of Attitudes. Guilford Press.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random
House.
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case of interpersonal violence. Violence Vict, 23(1), 83-97; Darley, J M, & Latané, B. (1968).
Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility. J Pers Soc Psychol, 8(4), 377-
383; Latané, B, & Darley, J M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention in
emergencies. J Pers Soc Psychol, 10(3), 215-221; Melde, C, & Rennison, C.M. (2010).
Intimidation and street gangs: Understanding the response of victims and bystanders to perceived
gang violence. Justice Quarterly, 27(5), 619-666; Monroe, K.R. (2008). Cracking the code of
genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and nazis during the Holocaust.
Political Psychology, 29(5), 699-735; Staub, E. (2003). The psychology of bystanders,
perpetrators, and heroic helpers. In: The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, adults and
groups help and harm others, NY, Cambridge University Press, pp. 291-324.
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 143
Epilogue:
Evilightenment
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and
evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to
abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.
— Benjamin Franklin
Charles Darwin observed that of all the differences between humans and other animals, one capacity
reigns supreme: we alone have the ability to contemplate what others ought to do. We alone are endowed
with a moral imperative to reflect, consider, and imagine alternatives. We alone are impelled to be
dissatisfied with the status quo, urged to contemplate what could be and ultimately what must be. This
capacity creates a fundamental principle of human existence and enlightenment: we alone invest in the
survival of the least fit. We give money to those in abject poverty, risk our lives to help others in areas of
conflict, adopt abandoned children, nurture individuals with extreme disabilities, and care for the elderly.
This principle fuels our humanitarian efforts. Sadly, it is a necessary response to another unique
difference between humans and other animals: we alone have the ability to inflict great harms on our own
species and many others. We alone are responsible for creating work for those in the humanitarian sector.
We alone are evil.
We also have an opportunity to begin a new volume of humane history. We have the chance to
harness our understanding of the past in order to present our children with the gift of knowledge and the
prospects of a healthier future. We should ⎯⎯ no, we must ⎯⎯ teach our children what we have learned
about the causes of corporate corruption, the desire for ethnic cleansing, and the combined forces of
nature and nurture to create excessive suffering and lifeless flesh. These are topics that should be
presented early on in education rather than waiting for heady discussions at the university. We owe the
next generation the best education from our generation. The best education will come from confronting
history, exposing human nature, and supporting cultural variation while fighting to demolish totalitarian
regimes that limit or eliminate basic human rights. I write this sentence following on the eve of Egypt's
inspiring revolution, a revolution led by educated people who refused to allow the dictator Hosni
Mubarak to ruin their country and their children's future. The people of Egypt, like the people of many
countries who rallied in the Arab spring of 2011, refused to be eternal victims. This is a lesson that must
spread to every corner of the globe. It is a lesson of hope. It is a lesson to all evildoers to beware.
I have taken you on a journey into evil’s core, penetrating with scientific evidence and
explanation. Though we have traveled to distant lands, traversed vast spans of time, and encountered
wildly different cultures, the key idea is that this richness was generated from a few essential ingredients.
This is a minimalist approach to a difficult and highly variegated problem. I end our journey by taking
stock of the essential ideas and reflect on some of the broader implications.
Retracing our steps
In the beginning, before there were bald, bipedal, big-brained, babbling humans, there were hairy,
quadrupedal, bitsy-brained, barking bonobos. These animals, clearly clever, have survived for over 6-7
million years, despite attempts by our species to demolish their habitat. But ⎯⎯ and this is a significant
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 144
but ⎯⎯ in the millions of years that encompass their evolutionary history, bonobos have remained virtually
unchanged. They are still hairy, quadrupedal, bitsy-brained and barking. They still live in the jungles of
Africa. Not a single bonobo, or its close relative the chimpanzee, has ever taken a step out of Africa the
way that members of our species did some 60-100,000 years ago. In fact, not a single bonobo or
chimpanzee has ever ventured across national borders within the continent to explore new opportunities
or develop new cultures. Not a single bonobo or chimpanzee has even moved out of the forests and on to
the beaches or deserts or alpine environments of Africa. Not one. When we took our steps out of Africa,
we did so with confidence, ready to tackle new environments, create novel tools, engage in rituals to
commemorate the dead, build fires to cook food and keep warm, join hands with unrelated strangers in
the service of cooperation, and create oral histories that could be passed on to generations of children.
What enabled this celebratory migration was a cerebral migration. Not only did our brain get much
bigger than the one housed within bonobo and chimpanzee skulls, it evolved into an engine that generates
an unlimited combination of thoughts and feelings. We uniquely evolved a promiscuous brain.
What does promiscuity buy? In a word: “creativity.” It enables regions of the brain that evolved
for highly specialized functions to intermingle with other regions of the brain to create new ways of
thinking and new ways of experiencing what we see, hear, touch, taste and feel. A promiscuous brain
paved the way for awe-inspiring bursts of creativity in art, music, literature and science. A promiscuous
brain enabled Bach and Bono, Picasso and Pollock, Shakespeare and Shaw, and Descartes and Darwin. A
promiscuous brain enables us to imagine things we have never directly experienced, to create once
unimaginable worlds, including blissful heavens and living hells. My focus in this book has been the
infernos we create for other human beings, here on this earth. What I have argued is that we got here by
accident.
When our brains allowed us to combine familiar thoughts and feelings to create virgin ideas, it
enabled us to feel good about doing bad. It enabled us to incur the costs of punishing others while reaping
the rewards of marching to the moral high ground. It enabled us to solve the problem of large scale
cooperation with unrelated strangers. This was a fundamental breakthrough in mental life, a spectacular
benefit, and the target of strong selection. But benefits often carry hidden costs. When punishment
triggered a honey hit to the brain, violence and reward formed an eternal bond. We now carry the burden
of a brain that engages in denial in order to satisfy our desires. When these concepts couple, the odds of
conceiving excessive harms is virtually guaranteed. Sometimes this malicious offspring is intended and
at other times it is foreseen. Either way, the world has been populated with evildoers in waiting. Either
way, our world hosts a species that has the creative capacity to financially ruin, mutilate, rape, burn,
torture, and extinguish millions of lives. Often, this potential is realized.
My aim in this book has been to explain evil to better understand its origins, not to justify or
promote it. My aim has been to explain evil to clarify its root cause, to alert others to its early warning
signs, and to pave the way to a more humane existence. I have suggested that evil, expressed in the form
of excessive harms, is caused by two ingredients: desire and denial. These are psychological states. On
their own, they are often inert. When combined, they are often explosive.
Desires. We all have them, from birth till death, from a desire for perpetual maternal warmth to a
desire for eternal life. Some of our desires change over the course of our lives while others stay the same.
We all desire good health and happiness. We differ, however, in what counts as good health and
happiness. Many of us experience, at least once in our life, the desire to harm another. Our desire to harm
ranges from the mundane ⎯⎯ uttering a sarcastic comment about someone’s looks or telling a racist joke
⎯⎯ to the horrific ⎯⎯ creating corrupt corporate schemes or policies of ethnic cleansing. Sometimes what
we desire is rather benign, but linked to foreseeable atrocities. Sometimes our desires are toxic, as when
we plot to extinguish a culturally distinctive group. On one reading, President George W. Bush may well
have initiated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as retaliatory attacks on terrorists, designed to protect
American interests and well-being. But he brought much of our nation on board by weaving a web of lies
and feeding a cowboy mentality of revenge rather than nurturing compassion and understanding. The
consequences, clearly foreseen at the time, have been excessive. As a nation, we did not pursue an eyefor-an-eye
revenge. We had a different algorithm in mind, on the order of 30,000 eyes for an eye.
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 145
Approximately 3,000 innocent victims died in the 9-11 attacks. As of early 2011, some where between
900,000 to over a million soldiers and civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq due to the war. This is
excessive. This is no longer revenge. This is senseless brutality.
On one reading, Pope Benedict XVI kept his knowledge of pedophilic priests quiet and
confidential in order to forgive them and protect the church. But this seemingly benign desire led to a
disaster, one that was foreseeable: continued sexual assault on thousands of innocent children and for
many, a loss of trust in the church and their moral and spiritual leader.
Discoveries by molecular biologists, neuroscientists, and psychologists reveal important
individual differences in our capacity to fuel desire, differences that constrain the paths we take from birth
until our last breath. Some individuals are more risk-prone, some are impatient, and some gain a greater
hit of dopamine in anticipation of reward, thereby doping themselves on the brain’s pharmaceutical
offerings. Some are born with a set of genes that diminish the capacity for self-control. These individuals
start with lower levels of serotonin. These individuals, if raised by abusive parents, have a higher
probability of taking someone’s head off if they are challenged. Some individuals are born with low
stress levels. These individuals are more likely to be sensation-seekers, voracious desirers who will stop
at nothing less than the spectacular, even if this means the spectacularly violent. None of these biological
catalysts operate in a vacuum. All of these biological catalysts feed off of particular environments that we
create. Geological and climatic factors create savannahs, oceans, and mountains. We create slums,
refugee camps, and totalitarian regimes. We are responsible for creating toxic environments and equally
responsible for cleaning them up. How we think about individual responsibility in cases of brain damage,
developmental disorders or innate differences in the starting state of our neurochemistry is a different
problem, one that I will touch upon in the last section.
Denial. We all engage in it, at least some of the time. Like the psychology of desire, our
engagement with denial is sometimes benign and often beneficial as a coping mechanism. We
dehumanize in order to buffer ourselves from the pain of another’s pain. We self-deceive in the service of
boosting self-confidence and self-esteem. When doctors turn their patients into machines that require
repair, they have deployed an adaptive mechanism that keeps empathy at bay when it is unnecessary.
Good doctors, the ones that we all want, turn empathy back on when their patients awake from surgery,
flesh and blood pulsating, thoughts and emotions humming. Bad doctors never turn empathy back on.
Evil doctors, such as Carl Clauberg who injected liquid acid in the uterus of Jewish prisoners as part of a
Nazi inspired sterilization program, not only lack empathy for their patients, but see them as vermin or
parasites that require extermination in the name of science and the preservation of our species. Denial has
transformed other human beings into nonhuman forms, from inert objects to wild animals and parasites.
Denial has allowed military leaders and airplane pilots to ignore clear signs of trouble, marching
thousands to their death. When this happens, moral responsibility checks out. Denial provides individuals
and nations with a certified license to maim, rape, burn, mutilate and kill without feeling guilt, shame or
remorse.
As with desire, the sciences provide a rich offering of evidence to explain how and why we
engage in denial, either by means of dehumanizing others or self-deceiving ourselves. Both
dehumanization and self-deception have a clear evolutionary logic. Dehumanization is a mechanism that
enhances an individual’s competitive edge by making hatred and killing easier. Hatred and killing are the
essential and ancient ingredients for defending the in-group and effacing the out-group. Sometimes,
soldiers would rather avoid killing the enemy. But when dehumanization of the enemy takes hold in the
mind of a soldier or civilian, killing is not only easy, but addictive. The brain’s inhibitory mechanisms,
processed by circuitry in the frontal lobes, shut down. Other brain regions involved in working out what
people believe and intend, enter into hibernation. With these circuits on leave, so too is our moral
conscience. When the mind runs its dehumanization software, abstinence from killing is like withdrawal
from a drug. Killing is satisfying. Killing is delicious.
Self-deception evolved in the service of deception. By functionally fooling ourselves into
believing that we are stronger, wiser, and more competent, we can convince others to go along for the
ride, to work for us or work against a fictional enemy. Like dehumanization, this has both adaptive and
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 146
maladaptive consequences. Brain imaging studies show that different circuits turn on when we lie about
long held personal stories as opposed to lies about in-the-moment situations. When we distort reality,
either omitting information or twisting it to create a false belief, we have to inhibit the way things are to
create an illusion of the way we wish them to be. In each case, there is conflict between one version of
reality and another. In each case, the electrical and chemical choreography of the brain recruits its
braking mechanism, stifling one piece of knowledge in the service of lifting another to the surface of our
lips. We perfect this capacity over the course of development. Some are born lacking this capacity.
Others have a system that is out of control, unable to distinguish truths from falsehoods. Somewhere
along this spectrum are healthy members of society who have the potential to justify themselves and a
society of willing listeners about the importance of becoming willing executioners, a phrase coined by the
historian Daniel Goldhagen to describe Germans involved in the Holocaust.
Desire + Denial. We all carry out this sum easily, often automatically and unconsciously. When
we are pushed by a desire to eliminate others or to achieve some other goal, we call on denial to justify
both extraordinary means and exceptional ends. We convince ourselves that we are morally in the right
and that extermination or manipulation are our only options. We convince ourselves that the other is an
object or animal, emotionally inert or unrecognizable. We shrink our moral circle, creating a culture of
indifference. We convince ourselves through self-deception that the other is a threat. When we feel
threatened, we raise our hackles in self-defense. When self-defense steps forward it recruits violence,
justified by the belief that fighting back is not only right, but obligatory. Once violence starts, supported
by a moral imperative, uncontrollable escalation follows, leaving a trail of dead bodies, raped women, and
abducted children. Desire couples with denial. Once this liaisons forms, it evolves, grows and feeds on
itself. We have arrived at excessive harms. We have arrived at evil.
What can we do? How can we harness our understanding of evil to predict when it might occur
again? Can we reduce future danger?
Future dangerousness
Why do we allow 16 year olds to drive in many parts of the United States, but prevent them from drinking
alcohol until 21 and from renting a car until 25? Why must the President of the United States be at least
35 years old, but members of the House of Representatives can enter at 25? If 16 is the magic number for
driving, why isn't it also the magic number for drinking, voting, becoming president, marrying without
parental consent, joining the military, and being executed for a felony murder? Or why not make 21 the
magic age for all age-restricted behaviors and positions? This would make sense in terms of our biology:
it is precisely around the age of 21 that our frontal lobes have matured more completely, thereby
providing us with a more functional engine for self-control. Or, why not question why we have a legal age
at all? Why not have a brain scan for frontal lobe maturation along with a test for self-control that would
allow some pre-16 year olds to drive, but might prevent some post-21 year olds from drinking? And if
you are in favor of the death penalty ⎯⎯ I'm not ⎯⎯ than why not detach it from age altogether and look at
the individual's moral competence and capacity for self-control?
These are hard questions. How we answer them will have resounding implications for law and
society. When a legal system decides that someone can drive, drink, vote, kill, run for president, marry,
and die as a penalty for crime, it has constrained human behavior based on a statistical evaluation of
psychological capacity. In each case, our assignment of age-appropriateness indicates that we believe the
person is responsible for his or her actions and thus, his or her future actions. It also indicates that those
under age are not responsible for their actions. We grant permission to drive at 16 years of age because
we believe that most 16 years olds are capable of driving responsibly, now and in the future. We believe
that a person who committed a heinous crime at the age of 18 is responsible for harming others and is
likely to do so in the future. He or she is thus eligible for the death penalty, at least in some states within
the United States. In contrast, we believe that someone at the age of 17 is still developing and has the
potential to change. In this sense, we hold them less responsible for their actions.
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 147
Looking out at the tapestry of age-limited situations reveals a rather eclectic pastiche. In many of
these cases, the cut-off age seems both arbitrary and inappropriate given the statistics. Consider the legal
driving age. Is it the case that 16 year olds are responsible drivers? 16 years olds have higher crash rates
than any other age group in the United States, are more likely to die in a car crash than the average of all
other age groups, and car crashes are the leading cause of death among 16 year olds. North Dakotans
believe that 14 year olds can drive a car. They may have fewer drivers on the road, but that doesn’t mean
that a 14 year old won’t hit them or drive off the road after irresponsibly drinking. Why not keep all
youths off the road until 21 when the statistics on fatal car crashes drop? Or why not follow the lead of
car rental agencies and wait for the 25 th birthday?
There are at least two common answers to the driving age problem, both utilitarian: in farming
communities, and other environments where children work with their parents, it is essential to have
children driving as soon as possible; and throughout the country, many parents look forward to the day
when their children can drive, thereby alleviating the need for their private chauffeur service. There is no
question that these are benefits. But if the cost is death to the child and others, the economics just don’t
work out. One option would be to lower the legal driving age for those communities or situations in
which parents demonstrate the significance of young children driving for their financial security and well
being. Those without this justification must wait until they are 21, frontal lobes matured and the novelty
of intoxication lowered.
The most interesting and relevant age-related issue is when someone is treated as an adult as
opposed to a juvenile criminal. Within the United States, most states set the bar at 18 years, but some as
young as 16. Where a state sets its bar determines whether or not the individual is eligible for the death
penalty or a life sentence, as well as a host of social services. Many states with the bar currently set
below 18, including my own state of Massachusetts, are presently debating whether the age limit should
be raised. For some, the issue is simply one of parity: this is not an issue where states should differ, and
thus everyone should be with the majority at 18 years. Others add to this discussion by arguing that it
should be 18 because of brain maturation. Although it is absolutely the case that a more mature brain
brings with it better self-control and less sensation-seeking or risk-taking, there is no evidence of a
reliable difference between 16, 17 and 18 year olds. Some 16 year olds are remarkably patient and riskaverse
whereas some 18 years olds are remarkably impulsive and risk-prone. If this is to be a meaningful
discussion about future risks, plasticity, and the opportunity for rehabilitation, it will have to grapple with
the scientific evidence that is presently on offer.
When we use age to distinguish between legally permissible and forbidden actions, we have
acknowledged that our biology and upbringing represent mitigating factors. We believe that juvenile
crimes are forgivable and their actions correctable. In fact, their crimes are forgivable because their
actions are correctable. Once we admit nature and nurture into the legal calculus concerning our youths,
we must also allow such factors to guide our decisions about adults with developmental disorders, brain
damage, and different genetic make-up. Yet, the law seems to have a double standard: youths lack free
will, whereas adults have it, even if it is somewhat diminished. But if we believe that juveniles lack a
sufficiently mature capacity for self-control, planning and thinking about alternative options, then we
must recognize that fully mature adults can lose these capacities as they naturally age, and can lose them
at any age if they suffer from brain damage. We must also wrestle with the fact that some people are born
with a genetic constitution that makes them more vulnerable to addictions, sensation-seeking, violence,
and a lack of compassion. Perhaps they too should be banned from driving, voting, drinking, marrying
and military combat. When do we look at the excessive harms caused by individuals or groups and hold
them responsible? When do we punish them to pay for their crimes and fend off future atrocities?
The law often invokes the notion of future dangerousness as a means of evaluating risk. So too
does the public and media. The general presumption is that for certain kinds of offences, there is a
predictably high level of recidivism, of doing the same thing over and over again. But the implication of
this judgment is that those who are deemed guilty are, in some way, not responsible for their future. Their
future is determined for them. In fact, it is so determined that the law is willing to make a confident
wager and send these criminals to prison or to their death. On this view, someone who has already
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 148
repeated a crime is more likely to repeat than someone who has only committed a crime once. On this
view, those who engage in certain kinds of crimes, such as child molesters and rapists, are more likely to
repeat because it is “in” their system. Unfortunately, both folk perception and legal analysis of future
dangerousness are based on weak evidence, unfounded assumptions, or both.
Consider sexual offenders. Their crime is intentional, frequently repeated, and aimed at innocent
victims. Given that many sexual offenders repeat their offenses, it has the appearance of inevitability, of
a process that is highly determined. Because many sexual offenders were abused as children, some
experts conclude that we should blame their parents. Other experts believe that particular situations either
promote or support sexual offenders, including the church and medical exam rooms. And yet other
experts, including the psychiatrist Boris Schiffer, reveal brain differences among pedophiles, including
especially the areas involved in reward and self-control. Together, these observations suggest that the
combination of a deviant nature and toxic nurture have led to a more deterministic universe. In this
universe, sexual offenses are inevitable or so highly probable that we should lock up offenders and post
their crimes in every county’s registry, and if possible, as replacements for flamingo lawn art.
If this assessment of sexual offenders is right, how should we think about responsibility, blame,
and punishment. If sexual offenders can’t help themselves, how should we assign blame? How should we
assign an appropriate level and form of punishment, if punishment is even appropriate? Studies of
recidivism among sexual offenders generate rates as low as 15% and as high as 80%. These studies also
reveal that recidivism rates differ for incest perpetrators, rapists, and child molesters. These numbers tell
us that even child molesters don’t always repeat their crimes. They also tell us that sexual offences should
not be lumped, but split apart into their underlying causes and triggers. Like the high odds favoring a
horse with a distinguished lineage and top rated jockey, there are high odds favoring repeated sexual
molestation in an individual who was sexually abused as a child and enters the clergy. Does this mean
that we should all bet on this one horse or forget the race altogether? Does this mean that we should lock
up the priest before he has an opportunity to enter his parish? No and No. Neither horse racing nor sexual
molestation are that easily determined. Future success and future dangerousness are probabilistic. They
represent our best guesses. When the law determines that someone is at high risk of committing a future
offense, it doesn’t really care whether the individual is perfectly healthy or brain damaged. It cares about
risk. In terms of blame and punishment, however, the law cares about the perpetrator’s brain. The law
cares about a person’s capacity to act rationally and independently. It is this capacity that allows us to
assign responsibility. It is this capacity that drives many theories of blame and punishment, including the
Australian legal scholar Michael Moore’s massive treatise Placing Blame. These are reasons why
scientific understanding of future dangerousness is important for law and society.
Armed with these ideas about future dangerousness, we can return to the list of potential evildoers
that I mentioned in the prologue. This list included individuals who caused relatively minor harms such as
Reverend Lawrence Murphy and Charles Manson, as well as those who committed much more major
harms such as Idi Amin and Mao Zedong. Whether we consider these individuals and their acts as evil is
orthogonal to the fact that each one posed a great risk to society. Each of these individuals would have
been judged as high risk for causing future danger. Only some of these individuals should have been
punished if punishment is guided by our understanding of responsibility and blame. Only those
individuals who can take responsibility for their actions and change should be punished. On this view, all
of the dictators were rightly blamed and punished. And so too were Jane Toppan, Bernard Madoff, and
Charles Granger. In contrast, although Lawrence Murphy should have been locked up as opposed to
exiled to a cottage, both Murphy and Charles Manson are more difficult to assess in terms of
responsibility, and thus, the appropriateness of punishment. No one would want them walking the streets
today, free to rape innocent children or create a cult of murderers. But for the law to evolve, we need
better tools to evaluate the biological underpinnings of diminished capacity. These measures, still in the
early stages of development, will help refine our understanding of risk, guide our clinical interventions,
and contribute to the construction of a safer society.
As we move forward, we must also recognize the rapidly changing landscape, and the future
dangerousness of globalization, especially its capacity to breed evildoers. Like authority, conformity,
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 149
dehumanization, and self-deception which each have both beneficial and toxic personalities, so too does
globalization. Globalization has integrated developing countries into the global economy and allowed
them to profit from new resources and advances. But globalization has also fragmented these countries
by giving them access to resources that corrupt, such as arms for guerrilla leaders and rogue armies. What
has changed in the twenty-first century, perhaps as early as the 1990s, is a new form of war, one that is
tied to the signature of evil and its expression as excessive harm. No longer are wars confined to state
borders, restricted to states and their legitimized militaries, financed by governments and tax revenues,
and focused on combatants. Instead, the new wars of the twenty-first century have entirely porous
boundaries, are funded by private organizations, run by grass-root groups, and motivated by the use of
horrific means to achieve equally horrific ends, including torture, rape, mutilation, and the use and abuse
of civilians, women, children and men alike. As a result, international law is effectively, ineffective.
Those running these new wars are outside of international law.
The consequence of the new wars extends beyond the travesties experienced by those living in
these hot spots to the humanitarian aid workers and journalists who attempt to help the victims.
Humanitarian aid is often pirated by rogue militias, and journalists are frequently killed or badly injured.
We must therefore face the sad reality that as we ended the twentieth-century and initiated the twentyfirst,
casualties to non-combatant civilians shifted from few to many. We must face the reality that
combating evil will require new laws and new protections for those who risk their lives to aid victims and
give voice to their often silent suffering.
Evil ever after?
We won't eradicate evil. Why? Because the capacity for evil is rooted in human nature, born of a
promiscuous mind that enables ideas and feelings to flip between beneficial and toxic. Though we
institute programs and practices that promote the beneficial, living within every human mind is a toxic
neighbor, waiting to move in. Adhering to authorities is beneficial in that great leaders are energizing,
empowering, creative, and a source of guidance into a brighter future. But even great leaders can turn
toxic, imposing corrosive ideologies and eliminating basic human rights. Conformity is beneficial in that
we want to live in a society where norms are followed, providing stability and cooperation. But
conformity is toxic when it leads to blind faith and uncritical thinking. Dehumanization is beneficial in
allowing us to carry out medical procedures and live with certain kinds of human suffering. But
dehumanization is toxic when it facilitates ethnic cleansing by shrinking the moral circle, turning
atrocities into virtuous offerings. Tolerance and pluralism are beneficial in that they lead to respect and
concern for others’ attitudes and desires. But tolerance and pluralism are toxic when they breed apathy
and a willingness to stand by as passive bystanders.
My diagnosis of evil is not meant to be defeatist, but realist. It is only through an
acknowledgment of our biology and the environments it has created ⎯⎯ and can create ⎯⎯ that we can look
for solutions to ameliorate the human condition. We are all vulnerable to walking on the wrong side. We
are fallible. We are also enormously creative, capable of great change. Like no other species, we
relentlessly seek novelty. No one wants to be like his or her predecessor. Whether it is a new culinary
tradition, extreme sport, technological innovation, musical genre, or weapon of destruction, our search for
novelty is an indestructible component of human nature.
Our journey into the nature of evil has come to an end. Bombarded by the sheer magnitude of
lives lost or damaged beyond repair, it is natural to deaden our senses and choke our feelings in the hope
of finding solitude and peace. As painful as a re-awakening is, we must remember the individuals that
make up these massive atrocities. Reflecting upon the loss of his son who was murdered by the Lord's
Resistance Army, an 80 year old Ugandan chief summed it up ⎯⎯ "We have been forgotten. It’s as if we
don’t exist."
We must never forget. We must never deny our potential to cause horrific pain and suffering
while finding ways to forgive and express deep compassion. We must never give up on humanity.
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 150
Endnotes: Epilogue
Recommended Books:
Glover, J. (2000). Humanity. Yale University Press.
Grossman, D. (1996). On Killing. New York: Back Bay Books.
Moore, M.S. (2010). Placing Blame. Oxford University Press.
Quotes:
• Human Rights Watch Report, 2010, “The Trail of Death”
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 151