On March 10, 1302, a forty-six-year-old politician in Italy was sentenced to death by fire in his hometown of Florence. A former soldier, he was a romantic soul who wrote poetry and moonlighted as a pharmacist, but he had gotten tangled up in a bitter local power struggle. That wasn’t hard to do in fourteenth-century Florence. Three centuries earlier, a battle for control had begun between the pope and the Holy Roman emperor. A group called the Ghibellines, known as the Whites, supported the emperor, while the Guelphs, known as the Blacks, remained staunchly behind the pope. Medieval Italy was not yet a unified state, but a fractious patchwork of fiefdoms, so the imperial tensions between the pope and the emperor frequently played out in the smaller realms of cities. It was a time rife with the worst of human nature: intrigue, double-crossings, and vengeance.
In Florence, a new, crusading podestà, or high magistrate, had recently taken power. He was of the Blacks, and he soon brought charges of corruption against this politician, which resulted in his death sentence. The newly condemned man was away from Florence at the time of the judgment, so to avoid being burned at the stake, he began a life of exile in Tuscany and elsewhere, an exile from which he would never return. He’d chosen to bond himself with the wrong group, altering the course of his life. The politician’s name was Dante Alighieri, the man we know today as the author of The Divine Comedy.
Around 1308, Dante began work on the poem that would secure his place in history. Using the time of his exile to explore the heights and depths of human nature, he finished The Divine Comedy in 1320. Over some fourteen thousand lines, he pondered the spiritual consequences of our deeds through a fictional journey to the afterlife. He divided his book into three parts corresponding to Christian theology: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso.” Accompanied by the poet Virgil, he descends into the underworld, where he witnesses the contrapasso, or poetic justice, that awaits all sinners after they die. Dante in fact introduced the idea of poetic justice; instead of the Old Testament’s “eye for an eye” justice, he envisioned a deeper, more satisfying retribution that would more effectively balance the scales against the types of sins committed. He had a dark and expansive imagination, and his vision of hell is painstakingly detailed, a nightmarish guidebook that is both maplike and cinematic. His Inferno has nine “circles,” each defined by the degree and substance of sin, with lawyers on Level Five and murderers on Level Seven. (No, Level Six is not Menswear.) The lowest circle of hell, where Lucifer resides, is the Ninth Circle, Cocytus, where the worst sinners of all are punished. The worst sin, according to Dante—after all, murderers are up a few floors on Level Seven—is to betray the trust of those close to you, as Dante himself had been betrayed.
Cocytus in turn is divided into four regions, which reflect the different arenas of life in which treachery and betrayal can occur: Caina, for those who commit treachery within their own family—named after Cain, its star prisoner, who slew his brother Abel. Antenora, for those who betray their country or homeland, named after a Trojan general who plotted with the Greeks to destroy Troy. Ptolemea, for those who betrayed their close friends. In this region, Dante displays his personal abhorrence of such crimes by devising an added punishment for those who betray their friends: their souls descend straight to hell upon their act of betrayal, while they are still alive, and their living bodies are possessed by demons. And the final innermost zone of Cocytus is named Judecca, after its most famous resident, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. In Judecca are the damned souls who, by betraying their benefactors, committed crimes that had great historical consequences.
At the center of the Ninth Circle is Lucifer himself, who betrayed God at the beginning of time, and for whom hell was created in the first place. Dante describes Lucifer as the “wretched emperor of hell, whose tremendous size (he dwarfs even the Giants) stands in contrast with his limited powers: his flapping wings generate the wind that keeps the lake frozen and his three mouths chew on the shade-bodies of three arch-traitors, the gore mixing with tears gushing from Lucifer’s three sets of eyes.” This is a fantastic, grotesque description, and yet the detail that jumped out at me when I read it was that lake.
Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, reserved for the most dastardly sinners, is not the fiery, torturously hot inferno of the title. Quite the contrary—it is a large, frozen lake. Here the damned souls are completely covered by the ice—like “straw in glass,” resembling hellish variations on poor Ötzti, whose bodily remains, you’ll recall, were preserved in their own chilly purgatory for thousands of years. But why, in the devilish imaginarium of The Divine Comedy, did Dante opt to freeze betrayers “in the cold crust,” instead of, say, burning them at the stake, as his enemies had tried to do to him?
Dante, like all truly great poets, had a sensitivity to human nature and could express things in words that the rest of us experience only on an intuitive level. Yet as with other great prose and poetry, once a gifted writer expresses those ideas we immediately resonate with them. In his contrapasso for betrayal, the poetic justice of freezing for eternity souls so coldhearted that they could betray their own friends for personal gain, Dante echoed the sentiments of St. Paul, more than a thousand years earlier. In his Apocalypse, written in the third century AD, St. Paul wrote of hell: “Even if the sun rose upon them, they would not be warmed because of the extreme cold in this place and the snow.” We use such figures of speech today, understanding each other perfectly well when we speak of a warm friend, or a cold and distant father. Why do we employ these metaphors that mix emotional and physical sensations, and why have we done so for millennia?
What Dante could not have known—but somehow did, without the benefit of modern science—is that seven hundred years later, neuroscience would show that when a person is dealing with social coldness (like betrayal of trust), the same neural brain structures are engaged as when that person touches something cold, or feels cold all over, as when she goes outside in the wintertime without a coat. Similarly, experiencing social warmth, as when you are texting your family and friends, activates the same specific part of the brain that is stimulated when you are holding something warm in your hand. Our brain comes with these associations wired in, which is why Dante’s choice to punish social treachery with eternal freezing represents the perfect balance of crime and punishment.
We are born to bond with and stay close to our parents and our family, and if all goes well that bond forms and is a very positive influence on our social relationships for the rest of our lives. But evolution cannot guarantee that our instinctive trust will be well placed, that our innate desire for closeness and bonding with our parents will be reciprocated by them. And so, remarkably early in our lives, as early as one year old, this bond is set, or it isn’t—we become either securely or insecurely attached to our moms and dads, or whoever is taking care of us. This powerful effect of our very early experiences in life sets the tone for how close and stable our friendships and romantic relationships are for the rest of our lives. And yet we are not aware of this early influence on us, because we have very little memory of this time in our life. This hidden influence of our own personal past comes from our evolutionary past, and we are equally unaware of how it affects us.
Dante got this right, too: the importance of trust and its dark sibling, betrayal, both of which are central to human life. Not for nothing did he consider the betrayal of friends, one’s country, one’s cause as the worst sins of all, its perpetrators assigned to a lower level of hell than even murderers. Trust is the basis of all our close relationships in life, and when you come right down to it, our close relationships are the most important things in each of our lives. When we trust another person, such as a friend to whom we tell something very private, we make ourselves vulnerable, but it is a risk we are willing to take in order to make that relationship even closer. The revelation of private information, confiding in the other person, is the currency that creates close relationships in the first place, the trading chips that establish trust between two people. And the number one reason close relationships come apart is that this trust breaks down, and we feel a friend or partner no longer has our back, because he or she is doing things behind it.
Yet when we are first born, tiny helpless infants, we have no choice but to place our trust, our lives, in our parents’ hands. We absolutely have to trust that they will take care of us—feed us, shelter us, keep us warm and safe—because we are unable to do these things on our own. But Mother Nature, operating through natural selection, has always appreciated Dante’s lesson about betrayal—that placing our trust in others is, unfortunately, not a sure thing, not a completely safe bet. Richard Dawkins describes many animal species in which one type, called “cheaters,” makes their easy living off of the trust and cooperation of the others, called “suckers.” So while we as infants are certainly ready, able, and willing to trust in our parents, siblings, and neighbors, they may turn out not to be trustworthy. This is something we learn very early in life.
The nature of our bonds with our parents, when we are infants, echoes our evolutionary past. This is where nature and nurture meet, where our species’ evolved predispositions and assumptions about our world that have evolved over eons are tested in the fires of actual experience, being validated or not based on our own personal reality. Can we trust people, or can we not? This question brings me back to my alligator dream.
Flipping my deeply held assumptions on their backs, that toothy, backstroking reptile showed me how the unconscious aspects of our mind are primary in our lives; first, the compelling motivations that we are born with, and second, the earliest knowledge about people that we form from our experiences as infants and toddlers. Strikingly, after the age of five or so, we do not retain any explicit conscious memories or awareness of having formed these important impressions. Both of these foundations of our future thoughts and actions, created by our hidden past, operate the rest of our lives in the background, unconsciously, driving much of our daily behavior and shaping much of what we think, what we say, and what we do. Sometimes for the better, but other times for the worse.
As most adults can attest, our parents, and their style of child-rearing, have a large impact on making us the people we become. This happens because of the things they consciously give to us: love, guidance, and punishment. It also happens because of the things they unconsciously give us: love, guidance, and punishment. They give these things to us consciously and intentionally, of course, but also when they don’t realize it, as we are watching and learning from them even in their unguarded moments. That is, our parents shape us in ways both intended and unintended, especially when we’re very young and malleable. They make deliberate parenting decisions, certainly, but in the daily bustle, much of the time they’re also just busy being themselves, and having to get lots of other things done. As children, we naturally absorb and imitate their behaviors. (Our two-year-old grandson Jameson is still, a week after returning to Indiana from his visit to our house, repeatedly throwing his arms in the air and yelling “Yaaa!” because out on our deck one day he happened to see me step barefoot on a hot coal that had fallen out of our barbecue.)
One of the most powerful influences our parents have on us, one that lasts the rest of our lives, is whether we form a basic trust in other people. What matters greatly is our own experience with our parents and caretakers, our relationship with them, and whether we feel secure and safe with them or not. Researchers of child development call this our attachment to our parents, and we can become securely attached to them, or insecurely attached. We know or intuit we can count on them, that they will be there for us when we need them (which is fairly often when you are an infant), or not so much. Remarkably, this feeling of attachment (or the lack of it) is pretty much set by the time we are just one year old.
Current research is examining how this plays out over the life span. Jeff Simpson and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota have been following a group of children now for more than twenty years to gain new insights into human life trajectories. When they were twelve months old, the infant participants and their mothers were given what is known as the “Strange Test,” which, despite its spooky name, is the standard measure of how securely attached a child is to his or her parent. How does the child react, for instance, when the mother leaves the room? Does the child stay close to her when strange creatures (a man in a dragon suit) come into the room? Or does the child become distressed when the mother exits the room, leaving her alone with the experimenters, who are very nice and all, but still strangers? A securely attached child does not react with panic or upset to these situations as often as an insecurely attached child does, for the simple reason that a securely attached child feels more confident that her mother is coming back soon and would never leave her in a dangerous situation. In other words, securely attached children trust their mothers. Those who are insecurely attached, on the other hand, will cry and become distressed and even panicky in a strange situation, because in their experience the mother may not come back soon, and will not necessarily respond to their distress. They lack trust and confidence that the mother will “be there” for them when needed.
Now, by following this same set of children through childhood and adolescence, and into young adulthood, Simpson and his colleagues are able to see how much this early attachment with their mothers predicted how well the social lives of these children turned out. And indeed, how much these children trusted their mothers at age one as measured by the Strange Test predicted the quality and outcomes of their relationships with schoolmates in elementary school, friends in high school, and now their romantic partners. How did the one-year-old securely attached children compare to the less securely attached children as they grew up? In their early grade school years (age six), the securely attached children were rated as being more socially competent by their teachers. In high school (age sixteen), they had more close relationships with friends. And in their early twenties, they had more positive daily emotional experiences in their adult romantic relationships, were more committed to their partners, and recovered better from the normal, everyday conflicts that occur in close relationships. And these behaviors and broad-stroke life patterns had been foretold by how securely attached they had been to their mothers at twelve months of age.
When I was a brand-new father, I got some advice from a colleague who is an expert on close relationships and attachment. She told me to simply hug my daughter as much and as often as I could. I appreciated this, but, like most parents, I didn’t feel I needed any outside advice on this topic, because I naturally loved my daughter more than anything in the world—also, I’ve always been a hugger. Later, when she was two, I brought her to my office, where there was a couch and then a bit of a gap before a hardwood coffee table with sharp edges. My colleague came by to see my daughter and observed her crawling from the couch over the gap to the coffee table and back again with reckless abandon. “Now that’s a securely attached child!” she exclaimed. Knowing as I did that secure attachment would have positive consequences for the rest of my daughter’s life, my coworker’s summary judgment came as wonderful news to me.
Simpson and his team have shown how remarkably, even frighteningly, powerful our early experiences are in shaping our capacity to trust others, to succeed in friendship and then love. Yet we have no memory of these early experiences. The density of this early childhood amnesia is profound, and we all have it. We have about as much conscious memory of the first few years of our life as we do of our long evolutionary past, which in both cases is near zero. But it is a real double whammy to your ability to understand yourself when the most dramatically influential period of your life also happens to be the one you have the least conscious memory of.
Every parent knows the poignancy of losing those years of shared memories with their little ones. You remember those times so well, and sometimes remind your child of those cherished past moments when they are older, only to be met with a blank stare. When my daughter was very small, nearly every day she insisted on watching her favorite movie, Cars, with her hero Lightning McQueen. She rode around the house in a red toy Lightning car (No. 95, of course), sat in a Lightning McQueen chair, had a Lightning McQueen throw blanket, and on car trips would squeal and point with delight at any and all red Corvettes, thinking they were Lightning himself. (I may have played along with this, as for years she believed Lightning McQueen lived in Durham, Connecticut.) Several years later, when she was five, she wanted to watch a movie before bedtime, and I suggested Cars. It had been a while since we had watched it, and I reminded her how much she liked it. You can imagine my deep shock when she gave me that blank look, and told me quite firmly that she’d never seen it! (She told me this, ironically, while sitting in that same Lightning McQueen chair in front of the television.) And indeed, throughout the movie she showed no signs of remembering it at all. She was genuinely surprised by the plot turns and had no idea what was going to happen next. For her, it was as if she was seeing that movie for the first time.
As adults, insecurely attached people tend to have difficulties in friendships or romantic relationships and feel distrust toward their partners, yet it rarely occurs to them that part of the problem might reside in the hidden files of their personal history. Rather, their focus is usually on the present, on what is readily available to their conscious awareness, because after all, it is that conscious part of our mind that is trying to understand what is going on. It can only use the material it is aware of. So we think that a friend’s behavior, a colleague’s reactions, or maybe something else that doesn’t click about a relationship is causing the problem. We do not appreciate that these feelings that we have about others may come instead from the wellspring of our early attachments with our parents. Of course, these forgotten pasts can be a blessing as well as a curse. Their effect is also there for the happy ones among us who do feel trust in their friends, who do allow others to get close to them, and who tend to have longer-lasting and happier close relationships. They believe their friends and lovers are trustworthy people, but they too lack conscious awareness of the fact that a big chunk of the reason why they feel this way comes from their experiences as an infant.
What we are discussing here in essence is nurture, as opposed to nature. In the previous chapter, we looked at nature, how we come into the world factory-equipped with the dual drives to preserve our physical safety and to reproduce. Yet the factory of evolution did leave a number of dials that could be fine-tuned, which start out in a default position but which our early experience can adjust through nurture to more accurately reflect the specific features of our home and local environments, independent of the time-distant and slow-moving forces of evolution.
The process of natural selection is very slow. Our innate genetic adaptations to our world occurred very, very long ago. There is no way that evolution can keep up with faster-moving changes, such as today’s advances in technology and the social uses to which it is put. Human cultures and norms of social behavior by those around us are changing at a much, much faster rate than the snail’s pace of biological evolutionary processes. This is why we have the epigenetic stage of adaptation, when nurture and nature come together, when experience either turns on or doesn’t certain behavioral and physiological switches embedded in our genes. This formative period, when we as infants quickly fine-tune ourselves to first our caretakers and then our larger community and culture, is supremely important to our successful development as individuals. The new science of epigenetics is on the front line of understanding how this process works in our brains and bodies, and the simplest way to think of their findings is the following: we become what we become not only through our DNA or only through our environment, but through their interaction. This interplay between genes and experience, between our forgotten evolutionary past and our early lived past, is our personal destiny.
As an illustration of this process from elsewhere in the animal kingdom, consider the indigo bunting. This is a small, migratory bird native to the Americas, which is born with an innate ability to use the night sky, or “star maps,” to navigate long distances. But here is the kicker. Evolution cannot possibly furnish these birds with a complete and accurate star map ready-made for their brains, because the pattern of the stars in the night sky is constantly, gradually changing as the universe expands. The night sky today is not the same night sky of one thousand or even five hundred years ago. So the solution nature has come up with for the indigo bunting is to give it the innate capacity to quickly absorb the pattern of the night sky stars that is accurate for them, during their own lifetime.
In a classic experiment conducted at a planetarium in Flint, Michigan, in the 1960s, Stephen Emlen and Robert T. Longway put indigo buntings into contraptions with an ink pad on the base, so their feet would get inked when they walked on that base. Rising upward from and surrounding the base was a paper cone, expanding outward, like a cup that is narrower at its base and wider at its top. A screen lid kept the birds in the cone, but they could see out through the screen. Where exactly they walked on the cone, to go up to look outside, was thus marked by their inky feet. Using this ingenious apparatus, Emlen and Longway could expose the birds to different star orientations on the ceiling of the otherwise dark planetarium and then the next day remove and examine the paper cones to see which direction the birds had moved and oriented themselves. The researchers could change the star patterns any way they wanted to; they could move, for example, the position of the North Star or how the stars moved in relation to each other. When Emlen and Longway shifted the position of the planetarium’s stars, the birds shifted their orientation as well, as shown the next morning by their inky footprints on the paper cones. The buntings had learned a “sky map” as they watched the rotation of the stars. How did this astoundingly malleable operation occur in their bird brains? They were born with the hardware to navigate in this way, and through experience they “downloaded” the actual maps that would serve them in their given location.
As the dynamics of human attachment reveal, we too require some additional assembly and fine-tuning after we are born. When we come into the world, we have the innate tendencies, motivations, and goals that make up nature’s effect, anticipating to some extent the general conditions of our life, but then nurture’s effect takes over to adapt us to the actual conditions on the ground. Nature’s possibilities are adapted to nurture’s realities, especially during our early, memoryless years.
Many people are familiar with the famous monkey studies by Harry Harlow in the 1950s. These looked at the social problems of infant monkeys raised alone, and you may recall that each one had a maternal stand-in—a cloth mother and a wire mother. By observing the monkeys’ behavior, Harlow demonstrated that softness and comfort are essential for early life, above and beyond the primary need for food. The baby monkeys preferred to be with the fake mother covered in soft carpeting, even though they were fed from a bottle protruding from the wire mother. What is less known about this experiment is that the cloth mother was also the warm mother. Behind that comforting piece of cloth was a 100-watt lightbulb. The general area around the wire mother was kept warm by ambient heat but not from a direct source, as with the cloth mother. The lonely infant monkeys, deprived of their actual mother’s warmth, sought out a substitute and preferred being with the physically warm cloth mother. The saddest little monkeys of all were those deprived even of the source of physical warmth (and comforting cloth). To this day, I’m somewhat haunted by the movies shown in my college psychology classes of these pathetic creatures huddled in the corner of the room, alone and rocking themselves while the other monkeys ran and played with each other. The impact of whether the monkey had the cloth or the wire ersatz mother continued well beyond infancy, affecting the course of their entire adult social life.
In a way, Harlow had conducted a shortened, simian version of the longitudinal study in which Jeff Simpson and his colleagues tracked the Strange Test children over two decades. The monkeys raised alone did better later on—not great, but they could function socially—if they had had a source of physical warmth to cuddle against and become attached to, even though it came in the form of a lightbulb with a cloth torso.
Harlow’s study showed that when the monkeys held on to their cloth pseudo-mother, feeling its warmth against their own skin helped to establish a level of trust of and attachment to their comfortable but curiously nonresponsive parent. That we (as well as little monkeys) so strongly associate the physical warmth of being held close by our parent with the social warmth of their being trustworthy and caring toward us is the flip side of Dante’s astute and poetic connection between the physical coldness of the Ninth Circle of Hell and the social coldness of the traitors and betrayers condemned to spend eternity there. The salvation of those cloth-mother infant monkeys was that warmth helped to turn on the latent switch in their brains, connecting physical warmth (from being held close) and social warmth (I can trust this person, she cares for me and keeps me safe). That is why, compared to their wire-mother siblings, they turned out to be more socially well adjusted later on. As fellow primates, then, we have the innate potential and tendency to develop social warmth and trust toward others as long as we have a source of social warmth as infants (and interestingly, Harlow’s study shows that physical warmth can be a serviceable though imperfect substitute for this).
John Bowlby, the pioneering English attachment researcher, was one of the first to note that physical feelings of warmth were linked early in life to feelings of safety and that feelings of coldness were linked to feelings of insecurity. Especially with mammals that breastfeed their infants, the experience of being fed and held and protected goes hand in glove with the physical experience of warmth and closeness. Because these two things always happen together, they naturally become associated in the mind. This simple linkage is what allows us to predict and anticipate events in our life—that a yellow traffic light means a red will soon follow, that a flash of lightning will soon be followed by a loud clap of thunder, and when Uncle Ed greets us at his door he will say (as he always does), “Well, who’s this then?” Our early experience with our parents, being held close by those we trust the most, leads us to associate their physical warmth with the “social warmth” of trust and caring. Bowlby argued that this association, this co-experience of physical warmth and social warmth, was such a constant in our species for such a long period of time that it eventually became wired into our brains by evolution.
Lawrence Williams and I tested this idea in a natural, everyday situation—holding a cup of hot or iced coffee. If our unconscious has a hardwired connection between physical warmth (as when holding a hot cup of coffee) and social warmth (trusting and being generous to others), then holding something warm like a cup of hot coffee should increase our social warmth, too, our closeness to others. And the same with holding something cold (or feeling cold in general), like a cup of iced coffee—that should increase our feelings of social coldness and distance from others. But the strength of that association, how much the warm and cold experiences affect us as adults, should depend on our early experiences with our parents, our attachment to them when very little. These warm and cold effects depend not just on our long-ago hidden evolutionary past but on our own hidden infant past as well.
But first we had to test whether holding something warm or cold affected our social feelings. In our first study we replicated a classic impression-formation study by Solomon Asch, one of the early pioneers of social psychology. Asch performed a simple experiment in which he gave his participants just six personality traits that he said described a person, and participants rated how much they liked that person. Five of those traits were the same for everyone in the study, but one was different. Half of the participants saw the person described as warm along with the other five traits, and the other half read that the person was cold along with the other five traits. As you might expect, the participants liked the person who was described as warm and independent and sensitive, etc., to the person described as cold and independent and sensitive, etc.
What Lawrence and I did was quite simple: we repeated Asch’s procedure, but with just the five words that were the same for everyone. No one saw the words warm or cold in descriptions of the person they read about. Instead of those, we substituted an actual warm or cold physical experience, right before they read about the person. Would it have the same effect as reading the person described as warm or cold? That would only happen if the physical warm or cold effect was associated in the subjects’ minds with the social version of warm or cold, as Bowlby predicted, and St. Paul, Dante, and Harlow all intuited.
In our study the participant was greeted in the lobby of the psychology laboratory building at Yale. Then, during the elevator ride up to our lab on the fourth floor, the experimenter—who was part of our research team but was kept in the dark about the predictions of the study—casually asked the participant to hold the paper cup of coffee that was in his hand so he could reach down into his briefcase for some forms. Then he took the cup of coffee back and handed the participant the forms on a clipboard. All this took about ten seconds, but this brief holding of the coffee cup was the critical moment in our study. It was either a cup of hot coffee or of iced coffee from a nearby coffeehouse.
Once in the lab room, the participant read about a person described just as in Asch’s original study. And all participants read the same, identical description. But just as we had predicted, based on Bowlby’s theory, those who had briefly held the warm cup of coffee liked the person more than did those who had briefly held the cup of iced coffee. The brief physical experience of warmth or coldness had activated the analogous feelings of social warmth or coldness, which then influenced our participants’ liking of the person they read about. This happened entirely unconsciously: after the experiment was over, our careful questioning of the participants showed that they had no clue that holding the coffee in the elevator had in any way influenced their opinions of the person.
Of course they didn’t—would you have had any idea that whether you were holding something warm or cold in your hands could affect how you felt about someone you were meeting or reading about right then? I know for a fact I wouldn’t have, because this effect happened to me in a hotel room in Philadelphia after we had run and published the study! It was about 9 a.m. and I was attending a conference, in my room getting dressed and just about to head down for the day of talks, when my phone rang. A science reporter was on the line, wanting to ask me about the coffee studies, which had been published a few months earlier. And she specifically wanted to ask me about Lawrence Williams, because her article was about graduate students in psychology. I remember speaking of Lawrence in enthusiastic, glowing terms, going on about what a great person he is, in so many ways. When I paused to take a breath, the reporter shocked me with a simple question:
“By any chance do you have a cup of hot coffee in your hands right at this moment?”
I looked down at my right hand, almost in disbelief. She was right. I was holding one of those paper cups of coffee from the in-room coffee machine in my right hand as my left held the telephone. “Oh my God,” I said. “I do. Wow.”
She laughed. “Busted!” And then she explained that while she was sure I had a very positive opinion of Lawrence, it seemed to her that I was going a bit overboard with my superlatives, and she had a hunch that the warm-coffee effect might be operating—even on me, someone who knew all about its effect, but who was not paying attention to it at the time. My experience in that Philadelphia hotel room was very similar to that of participants in a study by Dutch researchers Hans IJzerman and Gun Semin. After they briefly held a warm beverage, they reported feeling closer to people they were prompted to think about, compared to those who had just held a cold beverage.
A decade later, other psychology and neuroscience experiments have confirmed this primal association between physical and social temperature, between feeling warmth and then acting in a warm, prosocial way. In fact, brain imaging experiments have shown that the same small region of the human brain, the insula, becomes active in response to both types of warmth—when touching something warm like a heating pad, and when texting family and friends. And Yale neuroscientists Yoona Kang and Jeremy Gray, along with social psychologist Margaret Clark and myself, showed that a separate small region of the insula responds both to holding something cold and to being betrayed by another participant in an economics game. Betrayal of trust, the ultimate social coldness—I can just see Dante and St. Paul up there in the clouds, nodding their heads (and maybe John Bowlby is there, too). Today, seven hundred years after Dante wrote the Inferno, and nearly two thousand years after St. Paul wrote his Apocalypse, we know where their intuitions came from, why they both considered being frozen in ice the poetic justice for people who betray others. And why today we still speak so easily of a warm friend, or a cold father. We always will. Because the connection between physical and social warmth, and between physical and social coldness, is hardwired into the human brain.
Yet at the same time, we know from Jeff Simpson’s (and others’) attachment research that the ability to trust in our parents and caretakers is not automatically taken for granted by evolution; there is instead a critical period of epigenesis after birth in which this connection is set or not, based on our actual experiences. Can we trust them or not? The baby monkeys in Harlow’s studies who had no source of physical warmth did not trust and could not interact with their fellows in adulthood. They hid in a corner by themselves instead of joining in the monkey fun. It was as if without any source of warmth, even physical warmth, their capacity for friendship and play had withered and died inside them.
What this suggests is that not everyone will make the connection between physical warmth and social warmth, or at least not to the same extent. We should expect securely attached children to show this connection more strongly than insecurely attached children. To test this prediction, Hans IJzerman and his colleagues went to a Dutch day care to study the warm-cold effect in sixty children from four to six years of age. The researchers first asked the children a series of fifteen questions that determined whether they were securely or insecurely attached. The children then went to do the actual experiment in either a cool room (around 60 degrees Fahrenheit) or a warm room (around 75 degrees), and which one they went to was randomly chosen for them. Then they were all given a bunch of colorful stickers. (Children love stickers. Think SpongeBob and Disney princesses.) They were then given an opportunity to share some of their stickers with another child—a friend.
The young children who were in the warm room gave more of their stickers to the other child than did those who were in the cold room, who were less willing to share their coveted stickers. Once again, feelings of physical warmth had activated feelings of social warmth and generosity. But only the securely attached children shared more in the warm room. The researchers found that the room temperature influenced the generosity (or stinginess) of only those children who had shown, in their answers to those questions, that they were securely attached to their parents. The warm room did not affect the degree of sharing of the insecurely attached children. Just as with Harlow’s monkeys then, firmly setting the human child’s brain switch to connect warmth and generosity, warmth and trust, warmth and friendliness, seems to depend on how things actually go in the home in the critical first few years of life.
We have seen how our deep and basic motivations for physical safety and survival, from our distant evolutionary past, bubble up to affect our social and political attitudes. So too does our own personal distant past as a tiny infant bubble up to affect our close relationships and basic dealings with other people. Because we have no conscious recollection of either of them, these two forms of our hidden past unconsciously influence us for the rest of our lives.
But nature has given us another set of cues about whom we can trust and cooperate with, a legacy of our long tribal past, in which, as Ötzti knew only too well, other human beings were the most dangerous creatures around. These are cues about whether other people are similar to us or not. Do they look and sound the same as those close around us, such as our parents and siblings and close neighbors? There has been a tremendous amount of research on such in-group versus out-group distinctions, and their consequences, in my own field of social psychology over the last fifty years. This research is showing that we are tuned to in-group/out-group distinctions starting at a very young age, indicating it is an innate tendency to do so. Even little eye movements by too-innocent-to-have-a-mean-thought infants subtly reveal preferences for members of their own group.
This preference is related to something John Bowlby noted about baby animals in general: that they have an evolved general predisposition to stay close to those who are similar to them. They don’t go off and play in the farmyard or forest with the other baby animals; instead they stay close to their own kind, the animals most like them who will be the ones who take care of them, give them food, provide warmth and shelter, and, most important, don’t try to eat them. As Bowlby recognized, human beings behave more or less the same way. For example, developmental psychologist David Kelly and his colleagues have shown that infants only three months old, given the choice of looking at faces of people who are the same racial-ethnic group as theirs (Caucasian) or the faces of a different racial-ethnic group (African, Middle Eastern, Asian), preferred to look at members of their own group. And just as with attachment and trust, this effect depended on the infants’ early life experience, because Kelly did not find any such preference in newborns. Similar studies have shown infants to also have a preference for their native language over other languages, even though they don’t yet understand a word!
The preference for those who are like us makes sense with regard to our evolutionary past. Long ago in our tribal, hunter-gatherer days, we rarely encountered strangers, and if we did, it might well have meant a threat to our survival. (Strange-looking people on horseback at the town gate was usually not good news.) It is understandable, then, that one legacy of human evolution is that we feel safer when we are with people who seem familiar, and less safe with people who are unfamiliar. But here is a glaring case where our technological advances have far outstripped the snail’s pace of evolution.
We can now easily travel to far-off lands, and people living there can travel to ours. We see and hear events going on everywhere on earth almost instantaneously, thanks first to the invention of radio and television, then to satellites and now the Internet. Many modern cities are now polyglot societies in themselves, with people from cultures around the world rubbing shoulders with one another on a daily basis. In short, our social surroundings are nothing at all like the towns and villages of the Middle Ages and before. Yet inside each of us still live those evolved preferences for our own group and, to some extent, against other groups that look, sound, and act differently. This is a sad and unfortunate legacy of our long evolutionary past, because after all, for all our seeming differences, there are infinitely more things that we share—those basic human needs for safety, the longing for warmth and trust, a desire to live well and take care of the people we love.
Yet we evidently cannot help dividing our social world into us and them, no matter that the dividing factors are often arbitrary things we have no control over, like our skin color or place of origin. In his original research on the in-group/out-group bias, British social psychologist Henri Tajfel and his colleagues showed just how ridiculously minimal these “us versus them” cues could be. They had their participants draw colored balls from an urn so that some drew red balls and some drew blue ones. (The selection was entirely random.) But later, when given the chance to divide up some money, the participants gave more to those who drew the same color ball as they had, and less to the others in the room. It doesn’t take much at all to snap us into thinking in terms of “our group” and the “other group” and to trigger liking and positive treatment of our own, and dislike and negative treatment toward the other. In fact, it turns out that even the very word us is unconsciously positive, and the word them is unconsciously negative—in the “automatic evaluation” experiments discussed in Chapter 5, us has the same automatic (immediate and unintended) positive effect on people as do words such as cake, birthday, and Friday, while them has the same automatic negative effect as poison, tornado, and Monday.
If a random red or blue ball is enough to trigger these “us versus them” feelings, then it is hardly surprising that group stereotypes and prejudices are inspired by more pronounced and substantive group differences, such as different languages or accents, different skin color, and different religions and cultural practices. Every culture on the planet has these stereotypes about the relatively powerless, or different-looking or -acting groups of people in their society. For a long time researchers in my field believed these developed in an individual only in late childhood or adolescence, maybe starting around age ten at the earliest. That is why many of us had such hope that the educational system could do a lot to ameliorate these negative group stereotypes in societies. Yet the recent advances in child social psychology, such as David Kelly’s pioneering study of the facial preferences of young infants, are starting to paint a much more pessimistic picture: that these in-group/out-group preferences may be forming much earlier in life, well before a child starts school.
Yarrow Dunham, a developmental psychologist at Yale, has studied young children’s implicit liking for their own group versus other racial and social groups. He took a standard technique for measuring unconscious, automatic biases in adults and adapted it for young children. This technique, called the Implicit Association Test, has buttons labeled Good and Bad, and kids simply press the Good button as fast as they can if a picture of something good comes on the computer screen, like a yummy piece of pie, and press the Bad button as fast as they can if something like a scary spider appears. So far, so good (and bad). Then the children are asked to do an unrelated activity. Later, the (white) children use these same buttons, but they are now labeled White and Black, and their job is to sort photos of faces of White and Black people as fast as they can.
And then comes the crucial part of the study. The children are then asked to do both tasks at the same time. So each button, the left and the right one, serves two purposes. The left one, for example, is to be used to say either White or Good, and the right one to say either Black or Bad, depending on whether a face or something else appears on the screen. Then the experiment is repeated but with one button standing for both Black and Good, and the other button for White and Bad. If a face comes on the screen, then use the White or Black button labels and press the correct button (left or right) depending on whether it is a face of a White or a Black person, but if anything else appears on the screen, then use the Good or Bad labels (of the same left and right buttons) and press the correct one. The key is whether the child is using the same (say, left side) button to indicate both Good and White, and the other (say, right side) button to indicate both Bad and Black, or, in the opposite condition, the same button for Good and Black, and the other one for Bad and White.
If the child—or any adult for that matter—associates White with Good, and Black with Bad, in their minds, even if they aren’t aware of doing so, then the task is easier if the same button is used for White and Good, and the other button for Black and Bad. And it is easier the more strongly they associate White with Good, and Black with Bad. The stronger that association for them, the faster they will execute the sorting task. But they will also, for the same reason, be slower when the button labels are changed, so that now White and Bad go together on one button, and Black and Good go together on the other. The way that Dunham measured the extent of pro-White and anti-Black feelings in their White child participants was to take the difference in their response times in the one condition versus the other—the extent to which they were faster when Good and White (and Bad and Black) went together on the same button, compared to how much slower they were when Bad and White (and Good and Black) went together. That gives a measure of their automatic or implicit racial preferences.
Notice how this experiment identifies implicit and unconscious prejudicial feelings because the children are not being asked at all what their feelings are toward Whites versus Blacks. This is only revealed indirectly by the extent to which “good” is associated with one group in their minds, and “bad” associated with the other group. Using this test, Dunham and his colleagues discovered that White six-year-old children showed the identical unconscious pro-White bias on this implicit test as do White adults. In fact, the size of this racial preference remained the same for different age groups—for six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults. In contrast, an explicit measure, as on a questionnaire, of liking for Whites and disliking of Blacks showed that the preference vanished with age. We clearly do learn in society that we should not like or favor one group more than another group, and so we say this (and, it is hoped, also believe it) when giving our conscious, intentional responses to such questionnaires. But the implicit and unconscious group preferences change not a whit over the life span. The implicit or automatic racial biases inside us at age six seem to stay inside us for the rest of our lives.
Similar findings of in-group preferences in young children have now been shown for the majority group populations in the United States, Japan, and United Kingdom. These very early preferences form the foundation for lifelong tendencies to favor one’s own group at the expense of other groups. If you have liked one group more since infancy, you will tend to want to spend more time with them, meaning you’ll have less time and fewer interactions with those of other groups, causing these biases to further ossify. In other words, you will involuntarily de-diversify your existence beyond socioeconomic factors that inherently limit our exposure to people who are different from us.
These are discouraging findings, to be sure, but all is not lost. There is a big difference in experience between a three-month-old who tends to prefer looking at faces of people similar to her parents and siblings, and a six-year-old who shows greater unconscious liking for their own racial group compared to a different racial group. Parents often look back and say that their children grow up so quickly: one day they are starting kindergarten and the next they are off to college. But if we parents think about it for just a moment, we know all too well that each and every day, especially with very young children in the house, is a long, wonderful, but exhausting grind. And between the ages of three months and six years, there are more than two thousand of such long, grinding days. Each of these days contains a whole lot of experiences for those children, who are soaking up knowledge about their social world like sponges during this time. Two thousand of such days during which they are exposed to their town’s, their country’s, their region’s culture—through television and other media, and neighborhood children at the playground. They learn values, notions of what is important, cultural preferences, who the good people and bad people are, and how to behave across a wide variety of situations.
This spongelike process, however, comes with built-in hazards. When children soak up culture, they absorb it in all its imperfection, including our society’s ideas about what different social groups are like. They trust it all blindly; they have no idea what part of it is correct and what part of it is just ignorant bias. They have no way to tell the two apart. And what is more, this cultural knowledge doesn’t just affect how they expect others to behave; it also affects what they come to expect from themselves, depending on what social groups they belong to: males or females, whites or blacks, Muslims or Christians, and so on. From the broader culture they are immersed in, then, our children unconsciously pick up ideas about what they themselves are supposed to be like, and what they personally should and should not be able to do.
We may not remember the first few years of life, but that doesn’t mean nothing of significance happened to us. On the contrary, much did happen that shaped our assumptions about the world, our feelings toward other people, and our confidence in ourselves. A life is like a flower, expanding from a tightly packed bud ever outward, opening more and more to the outside world. From the arms of our parents we then move around by ourselves inside our homes and then out to the broader neighborhood and town and culture that surround us. But as we move into the wider world, as we move from childhood onward, we continue to soak up what we see and hear and are told—now by other children, and by television and the mass media—in a totally innocent, gullible, trusting way. Our culture represents the third channel through which our hidden past continues to influence us today.