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ORGANIZING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

How Humans Connect Now

On July 16, 2013, a mentally unstable New York woman abducted her seven-month-old son from a foster care agency in Manhattan. In such abduction cases, experience has shown that the chances of finding the child diminish drastically with each passing hour. Police feared for the infant boy’s safety, and with no leads, they turned to a vast social network created for national emergency alerts—they sent text messages to millions of cell phones throughout the city. Just before four A.M., countless New Yorkers were awakened by the text message:

The alert, which showed the license plate number of the car used to abduct the infant, resulted in someone spotting the car and calling the New York City Police Department, and the infant was safely recovered. The message broke through people’s attentional filter.

Three weeks later, the California Highway Patrol issued a regional, and later statewide, Amber Alert after two children were abducted near San Diego. The alert was texted to millions of cell phones in California, tweeted by the CHP, and repeated above California freeways on large displays normally used to announce traffic conditions. Again the victim was safely recovered.

It’s not just technology that has made this possible. We humans are hard-wired to protect our young, even the young of those not related to us. Whenever we read of terrorist attacks or war atrocities, the most wrenching and visceral reactions are to descriptions of children being harmed. This feeling appears to be culturally universal and innate.

The Amber Alert is an example of crowdsourcing—outsourcing to a crowd—the technique by which thousands or even millions of people help to solve problems that would be difficult or impossible to solve any other way. Crowdsourcing has been used for all kinds of things, including wildlife and bird counts, providing usage examples and quotes to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, and helping to decipher ambiguous text. The U.S. military and law enforcement have taken an interest in it because it potentially increases the amount of data they get by turning a large number of civilians into team members in information gathering. Crowdsourcing is just one example of organizing our social world—our social networks—to harness the energy, expertise, and physical presence of many individuals for the benefit of all. In a sense, it represents another form of externalizing the human brain, a way of linking the activities, perceptions, and cognitions of a large number of brains to a joint activity for the collective good.

In December 2009, DARPA offered $40,000 to anyone who could locate ten balloons that they had placed in plain sight around the continental United States. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an organization under the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA created the Internet (more precisely, they designed and built the first computer network, ARPANET, on which the current World Wide Web is modeled). At issue was how the United States might solve large-scale problems of national security and defense, and to test the country’s capacity for mobilization during times of urgent crisis. Replace “balloons” with “dirty bombs” or other explosives, and the relevance of the problem is clear.

On a predesignated day, DARPA hid ten large, red weather balloons, eight feet in diameter, in various places around the country. The $40,000 prize would be awarded to the first person or team anywhere in the world who could correctly identify the precise location of all ten balloons. When the contest was first announced, experts pointed out that the problem would be impossible to solve using traditional intelligence-gathering techniques.

There was great speculation in the scientific community about how the problem would be solved—for weeks, it filled up lunchroom chatter at universities and research labs around the world. Most assumed the winning team would use satellite imagery, but that’s where the problem gets tricky. How would they divide up the United States into surveillable sections with a high-enough resolution to spot the balloons, but still be able to navigate the enormous number of photographs quickly? Would the satellite images be analyzed by rooms full of humans, or would the winning team perfect a computer-vision algorithm for distinguishing the red balloons from other balloons and from other round, red objects that were not the target? (Effectively solving the Where’s Waldo? problem, something that computer programs couldn’t do until 2011.)

Further speculation revolved around the use of reconnaissance planes, telescopes, sonar, and radar. And what about spectrograms, chemical sensors, lasers? Tom Tombrello, physics professor at Caltech, favored a sneaky approach: “I would have figured out a way to get to the balloons before they were launched, and planted GPS tracking devices on them. Then finding them is trivial.”

The contest was entered by 53 teams totaling 4,300 volunteers. The winning team, a group of researchers from MIT, solved the problem in just under nine hours. How did they do it? Not via the kinds of high-tech satellite imaging or reconnaissance that many imagined, but—as you may have guessed—by constructing a massive, ad hoc social network of collaborators and spotters—in short, by crowdsourcing. The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you happened to spot the balloon in your neighborhood and provided them with the correct location, you’d get $2,000. If a friend of yours whom you recruited found it, your friend would get the $2,000 and you’d get $1,000 simply for encouraging your friend to join the effort. If a friend of your friend found the balloon, you’d get $500 for this third-level referral, and so on. The likelihood of any one person spotting a balloon is infinitesimally small. But if everyone you know recruits everyone they know, and each of them recruits everyone they know, you build a network of eyes on the ground that theoretically can cover the entire country. One of the interesting questions that social networking engineers and Department of Defense workers had wondered about is how many people it would take to cover the entire country in the event of a real national emergency, such as searching for an errant nuclear weapon. In the case of the DARPA balloons, it required only 4,665 people and fewer than nine hours.

A large number of people—the public—can often help to solve big problems outside of traditional institutions such as public agencies. Wikipedia is an example of crowdsourcing: Anyone with information is encouraged to contribute, and through this, it has become the largest reference work in the world. What Wikipedia did for encyclopedias, Kickstarter did for venture capital: More than 4.5 million people have contributed over $750 million to fund roughly 50,000 creative projects by filmmakers, musicians, painters, designers, and other artists. Kiva applied the concept to banking, using crowdsourcing to kick-start economic independence by sponsoring microloans that help start small businesses in developing countries. In its first nine years, Kiva has given out loans totaling $500 million to one million people in seventy different countries, with crowdsourced contributions from nearly one million lenders.

The people who make up the crowd in crowdsourcing are typically amateurs and enthusiastic hobbyists, although this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Crowdsourcing is perhaps most visible as a form of consumer ratings via Yelp, Zagat, and product ratings on sites such as Amazon.com. In the old, pre-Internet days, a class of workers existed who were expert reviewers and they would share their impressions of products and services in newspaper articles or magazines such as Consumer Reports. Now, with TripAdvisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, and others of their ilk, ordinary people are empowered to write reviews about their own experiences. This cuts both ways. In the best cases, we are able to learn from the experiences of hundreds of people about whether this motel is clean and quiet, or that restaurant is greasy and has small portions. On the other hand, there were advantages to the old system. The pre-Internet reviewers were professionals—they performed reviews for a living—and so they had a wealth of experience to draw on. If you were reading a restaurant review, you’d be reading it from someone who had eaten in a lot of restaurants, not someone who has little to compare it to. Reviewers of automobiles and hi-fi equipment had some expertise in the topic and could put a product through its paces, testing or paying attention to things that few of us would think of, yet might be important—such as the functioning of antilock brakes on wet pavement.

Crowdsourcing has been a democratizing force in reviewing, but it must be taken with a grain of salt. Can you trust the crowd? Yes and no. The kinds of things that everybody likes may not be the kinds of things you like. Think of a particular musical artist or book you loved but that wasn’t popular. Or a popular book or movie that, in your opinion, was awful. On the other hand, for quantitative judgments, crowds can come close. Take a large glass jar filled with many hundreds of jelly beans and ask people to guess how many are in it. While the majority of answers will probably be very wrong, the group average comes surprisingly close.

Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, and other content providers have used the wisdom of the crowd in a mathematical algorithm called collaborative filtering. This is a technique by which correlations or co-occurrences of behaviors are tracked and then used to make recommendations. If you’ve seen a little line of text on websites that says something like “customers who bought this also enjoyed that,” you’ve experienced collaborative filtering firsthand. The problem with these algorithms is that they don’t take into account a host of nuances and circumstances that might interfere with their accuracy. If you just bought a gardening book for Aunt Bertha, you may get a flurry of links to books about gardening—recommended just for you!—because the algorithm doesn’t know that you hate gardening and only bought the book as a gift. If you’ve ever downloaded movies for your children, only to find that the website’s movie recommendations to you became overwhelmed by G-rated fare when you’re looking for a good adult drama, you’ve seen the downside.

Navigation systems also use a form of crowdsourcing. When the Waze app on your smartphone, or Google Maps, is telling you the best route to the airport based on current traffic patterns, how do they know where the traffic is? They’re tracking your cell phone and the cell phones of thousands of other users of the applications to see how quickly those cell phones move through traffic. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam, your cell phone reports the same GPS coordinates for several minutes; if traffic is moving swiftly, your cell phone moves as quickly as your car and these apps can recommend routes based on that. As with all crowdsourcing, the quality of the overall system depends crucially on there being a large number of users. In this respect they’re similar to telephones, fax machines, and e-mail: If only one or two people have them, they are not much good—their utility increases with the number of users.

Artist and engineer Salvatore Iaconesi used crowdsourcing to understand treatment options for his brain cancer by placing all of his medical records online. He received over 500,000 responses. Teams formed, as physicians discussed medical options with one another. “The solutions came from all over the planet, spanning thousands of years of human history and traditions,” says Iaconesi. Wading through the advice, he chose conventional surgery in combination with some alternative therapies, and the cancer is now in remission.

One of the most common applications of crowdsourcing is hidden behind the scenes: reCAPTCHAs. These are the distorted words that are often displayed on websites. Their purpose is to prevent computers, or “bots,” from gaining access to secure websites, because such problems are difficult to solve for computers and usually not too difficult for humans. (CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. reCAPTCHAs are so-named for recycling—because they recycle human processing power.) reCAPTCHAs act as sentries against automated programs that attempt to infiltrate websites to steal e-mail addresses and passwords, or just to exploit weaknesses (for example, computer programs that might buy large numbers of concert tickets and then attempt to sell them at inflated prices). The source of these distorted words? In many cases they are pages from old books and manuscripts that Google is digitizing and that Google’s computers have had difficulty in deciphering. Individually, each reCAPTCHA takes only about ten seconds to solve, but with more than 200 million of them being solved every day, this amounts to over 500,000 hours of work being done in one day. Why not turn all this time into something productive?

The technology for automatically scanning written materials and turning them into searchable text is not perfect. Many words that a human being can discern are misread by computers. Consider the following example from an actual book being scanned by Google:

After the text is scanned, two different OCR (for optical character recognition) programs attempt to map these blotches on the page to known words. If the programs disagree, the word is deemed unsolved, and then reCAPTCHA uses it as a challenge for users to solve. How does the system know if you guessed an unknown word correctly? It doesn’t! But reCAPTCHAs pair the unknown words with known words; they assume that if you solve the known word, you’re a human, and that your guess on the unknown word is reasonable. When several people agree on the unknown word, it’s considered solved and the information is incorporated into the scan.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is typically used for tasks that computers aren’t particularly good at but humans would find repetitively dull or boring. A recent cognitive psychology experiment published in Science used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find experimental participants. Volunteers (who were paid three dollars each) had to read a story and then take a test that measured their levels of empathy. Empathy requires the ability to switch between different perspectives on the same situation or interaction. This requires using the brain’s daydreaming mode (the task-negative network), and it involves the prefrontal cortex, cingulate, and their connections to the temporoparietal junction. Republicans and Democrats don’t use these empathy regions of their brains when thinking of one another. The research finding was that people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not. The experiment required hundreds of participants and would have taken a great deal more time to accomplish using physical participants in the laboratory.

Of course it is also a part of human nature to cheat, and anyone using crowdsourcing has to put into play checks and balances. When reading an online review of a restaurant, you can’t know that it was written by someone who actually dined there and not just the owner’s brother-in-law. For Wikipedia, those checks and balances are the sheer number of people who contribute to and review the articles. The underlying assumption is that cheaters, liars, and others with mild to extreme sociopathy are the minority in any given assemblage of people, and the white hats will triumph over the black hats. This is unfortunately not always true, but it appears to be true enough of the time for crowdsourcing to be useful and mostly trustworthy. It’s also, in many cases, a cost-saving alternative to a phalanx of paid experts.

Pundits have argued that “the crowd is always right,” but this is demonstrably not true. Some people in the crowd can be stubborn and dogmatic while simultaneously being misinformed, and having a panel of expert overseers can go a long way toward improving the accuracy and success of crowdsourced projects such as Wikipedia. As New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik explains,

When there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship [Wikipedia] page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the overall absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity.

Modern social networks are fraught with dull old dysfunction and wonderfully new opportunities.

Aren’t Modern Social Relations Too Complex to Organize?

Some of the largest changes we are facing as a society are cultural, changes to our social world and the way we interact with one another. Imagine you are living in the year 1200. You probably have four or five siblings, and another four or five who died before their second birthday. You live in a one-room house with a dirt floor and a fire in the center for warmth. You share that house with your parents, children, and an extended family of aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces all crowded in. Your daily routines are intimately connected to those of about twenty family members. You know a couple hundred people, and you’ve known most of them all your life. Strangers are regarded with suspicion because it is so very unusual to encounter them. The number of people you’d encounter in a lifetime was fewer than the number of people you’d walk past during rush hour in present-day Manhattan.

By 1850, the average family group in Europe had dropped from twenty people to ten living in close proximity, and by 1960 that number was just five. Today, 50% of Americans live alone. Fewer of us are having children, and those who do are having fewer children. For tens of thousands of years, human life revolved around the family. In most parts of the industrialized world, it no longer does. Instead, we create multiple overlapping social worlds—at work, though hobbies, in our neighborhoods. We become friends with the parents of our children’s friends, or with the owners of our dog’s friends. We build and maintain social networks with our friends from college or high school, but less and less with family. We meet more strangers, and we incorporate them into our lives in very new ways.

Notions of privacy that we take for granted today were very different just two hundred years ago. It was common practice to share rooms and even beds at roadside inns well into the nineteenth century. Diaries tell of guests complaining about late-arriving guests who climbed into bed with them in the middle of the night. As Bill Bryson notes in his intimately detailed book At Home, “It was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed.”

Human social relations are based on habits of reciprocity, altruism, commerce, physical attraction, and procreation. And we have learned much about these psychological realities from the behavior of our nearest biological relatives, the monkeys and great apes. There are unpleasant by-products of social closeness—rivalry, jealousy, suspicion, hurt feelings, competition for increased social standing. Apes and monkeys live in much smaller social worlds than we do nowadays, typically with fewer than fifty individuals living in a unit. More than fifty leads to rivalries tearing them apart. In contrast, humans have been living together in towns and cities with tens of thousands of people for several thousand years.

A rancher in Wyoming or a writer in rural Vermont might not encounter anyone for a week, while a greeter at Walmart might make eye contact with 1,700 people a day. The people we see constitute much of our social world, and we implicitly categorize them, divvying them up into an almost endless array of categories: family, friends, coworkers, service providers (bank teller, grocery store clerk, dry cleaner, auto mechanic, gardener), professional advisors (doctors, lawyers, accountants). These categories are further subdivided—your family includes your nuclear family, relatives you look forward to seeing, and relatives you don’t. There are coworkers with whom you might go out for a beer after work, and those you wouldn’t. And context counts: The people you enjoy socializing with at work are not necessarily people you want to bump into on a weekend at the beach.

Adding to the complexity of social relationships are contextual factors that have to do with your job, where you live, and your personality. A rancher in Wyoming may count in his social world a small number of people that is more or less constant; entertainers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and others in the public eye may encounter hundreds of new people each week, some of whom they will want to interact with again for various personal or professional reasons.

So how do you keep track of this horde of people you want to connect with? Celebrity attorney Robert Shapiro recommends this practical system. “When I meet someone new, I make notes—either on their business card or on a piece of paper—about where and how I met them, their area of expertise, and if we were introduced by someone, who made the introduction. This helps me to contextualize the link I have to them. If we had a meal together, I jot down who else was at the meal. I give this all to my secretary and she types it up, entering it into my contacts list.

“Of course the system gets more elaborate for people I interact with regularly. Eventually as I get to know them, I might add to the contacts list the name of their spouse, their children, their hobbies, things we did together with places and dates, maybe their birthday.”

David Gold, regional medical product specialist for Pfizer, uses a related technique. “Suppose I met Dr. Ware in 2008. I write down what we talked about in a note app on my phone and e-mail it to myself. Then if I see him again in 2013, I can say ‘Remember we were talking about naltrexone or such-and-such.’” This not only provides context to interactions, but continuity. It grounds and organizes the minds of both parties, and so, too, the interaction.

Craig Kallman is the chairman and CEO of Atlantic Records in New York—his career depends on being able to stay in touch with an enormous number of people: agents, managers, producers, employees, business colleagues, radio station managers, retailers, and of course the many musicians on his label, from Aretha Franklin to Flo Rida, from Led Zeppelin to Jason Mraz, Bruno Mars, and Missy Elliott. Kallman has an electronic contacts list of 14,000 people. Part of the file includes when they last spoke and how they are connected to other people in his database. The great advantage that the computer brings to a database of this size is that you can search along several different parameters. A year from now, Kallman might remember only one or two things about a person he just met, but he can search the contacts list and find the right entry. He might remember only that he had lunch with him in Santa Monica about a year ago, or that he met a person through Quincy Jones. He can sort by the last date of contact to see whom he hasn’t caught up with in a while.

As we saw in Chapter 2, categories are often most useful when they have flexible, fuzzy boundaries. And social categories benefit from this greatly. The concept of “friend” depends on how far you are from home, how busy your social life is, and a number of other circumstances. If you run into an old high school friend while touring Prague, you might enjoy having dinner with him. But back home, where you know lots of people with whom you prefer spending time, you might never get together with him.

We organize our friendships around a variety of motivations and needs. These can be for historical reasons (we stay in touch with old friends from school and we like the sense of continuity to earlier parts of our lives), mutual admiration, shared goals, physical attractiveness, complementary characteristics, social climbing. . . . Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)

Friendships obviously also revolve around shared likes and dislikes—it’s easier to be friends with people when you like doing the same things. But even this is relative. If you’re a quilting enthusiast and there’s only one other in town, the shared interest may bring you together. But at a quilting convention, you may discover someone whose precise taste in quilts matches yours more specifically, hence more common ground and a potentially tighter bond. This is why that friend from back home is a welcome companion in Prague. (Finally! Someone else who speaks English and can talk about the Superbowl!) It’s also why that same friend is less interesting when you get back home, where there are people whose interests are more aligned with yours.

Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads. These days, many of us increasingly find that we can’t keep track of all the people we know and new people we meet. Cognitive neuroscience says we should externalize information in order to clear the mind. This is why Robert Shapiro and Craig Kallman keep contact files with contextual information such as where they met someone new, what they talked about, or who introduced them. In addition, little tags or notes in the file can help to organize entries—work friends, school friends, childhood friends, best friends, acquaintances, friends of friends—and there’s no reason you can’t put multiple tags in an entry. In an electronic database, you don’t need to sort the entries, you can simply search for any that contain the keyword you’re interested in.

I recognize that this can seem like a lot of busywork—you’re spending your time organizing data about your social world instead of actually spending time with people. Keeping track of birthdays or someone’s favorite wine isn’t mutually exclusive with a social life that enjoys spontaneity, and it doesn’t imply having to tightly schedule every encounter. It’s about organizing the information you have to allow those spontaneous interactions to be more emotionally meaningful.

You don’t have to have as many people in your contact list as the CEO of Atlantic Records does to feel the squeeze of job, family, and time pressures that prevent you from having the social life you want. Linda, the executive assistant introduced in the last chapter, suggests one practical solution for staying in touch with a vast array of friends and social contacts—use a tickler. A tickler is a reminder, something that tickles your memory. It works best as a note in your paper or electronic calendar. You set a frequency—say every two months—that you want to check in with friends. When the reminder goes off, if you haven’t been in touch with them since the last time, you send them a note, text, phone call, or Facebook post just to check in. After a few of these, you’ll find you settle into a rhythm and begin to look forward to staying in touch this way; they may even start to call you reciprocally.

Externalizing memory doesn’t have to be in physical artifacts like calendars, tickler files, cell phones, key hooks, and index cards—it can include other people. The professor is the prime example of someone who may act as a repository for arcane bits of information you hardly ever need. Or your spouse may remember the name of that restaurant you liked so much in Portland. The part of external memory that includes other people is technically known as transactive memory, and includes the knowledge of who in your social network possesses the knowledge you seek—knowing, for example, that if you lost Jeffrey’s cell phone number, you can get it from his wife, Pam, or children, Ryder and Aaron. Or that if you can’t remember when Canadian Thanksgiving will be this year (and you’re not near the Internet), you can ask your Canadian friend Lenny.

Couples in an intimate relationship have a way of sharing responsibility for things that need to be remembered, and this is mostly implicit, without their actually assigning the task to each other. For example, in most couples, each member of the couple has an area of expertise that the other lacks, and these areas are known to both partners. When a new piece of information comes in that concerns the couple, the person with expertise accepts responsibility for the information, and the other person lets the partner do so (relieving themselves of having to). When information comes in that is neither partner’s area of expertise, there is usually a brief negotiation about who will take it on. These transactive memory strategies combine to ensure that information the couple needs will always be captured by at least one of the partners. This is one of the reasons why, after a very long relationship, if one partner dies, the other partner can be left stuck not knowing how vast swaths of day-to-day life are navigated. It can be said that much of our data storage is within the small crowd of our personal relationships.

A large part of organizing our social world successfully, like anything else, is identifying what we want from it. Part of our primate heritage is that most of us want to feel that we fit in somewhere and are part of a group. Which group we’re part of may matter less to some of us than others, as long as we’re part of a group and not left entirely on our own. Although there are individual differences, being alone for too long causes neurochemical changes that can result in hallucinations, depression, suicidal thoughts, violent behaviors, and even psychosis. Social isolation is also a risk factor for cardiac arrest and death, even more so than smoking.

And although many of us think we prefer being alone, we don’t always know what we want. In one experiment, commuters were asked about their ideal commute: Would they prefer to talk to the person next to them or sit quietly by themselves? Overwhelmingly, people said they’d rather sit by themselves—the thought of having to make conversation with their seatmate was abhorrent (I admit I would have said the same thing). Commuters were then assigned either to sit alone and “enjoy their solitude” or to talk to the person sitting next to them. Those who talked to their seatmate reported having a significantly more pleasant commute. And the findings weren’t due to differences in personality—the results held up whether the individuals were outgoing or shy, open or reserved.

In the early days of our species, group membership was essential for protection from predators and enemy tribes, for the sharing of limited food resources, the raising of children, and care when injured. Having a social network fulfills a deep biological need and activates regions of the brain in the anterior prefrontal cortex that help us to position ourselves in relation to others, and to monitor our social standing. It also activates emotional centers in the brain’s limbic system, including the amygdala, and helps us to regulate emotions. There is comfort in belonging.

Enter social networking sites. From 2006 to 2008, MySpace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and was the most visited website of any kind in the United States, surpassing even Google. Today, it is the Internet equivalent of a ghost town with digital tumbleweeds blowing through its empty streets. Facebook rapidly grew to be the dominant social networking site and currently has more than 1.2 billion regular monthly users, more than one out of every seven people on the planet. How did it do this? It appealed to our sense of novelty, and our drive to connect to other people. It has allowed us to keep in touch with a large number of people with only a small investment of time. (And for those people who really just want to be left alone, it allows them to stay connected with others without having to actually see them in person!)

After a whole lifetime of trying to keep track of people, and little slips of paper with their phone numbers and addresses on them, now you can look people up by name and see what they’re doing, and let them know what you’re doing, without any trouble. Remember that, historically, we grew up in small communities and everyone we knew as children we knew the rest of our lives. Modern life doesn’t work this way. We have great mobility. We go off to college or to work. We move away when we start a family. Our brains carry around a vestigial primordial longing to know where all these people in our lives ended up, to reconnect, to get a sense of resolution. Social networking sites allow us to do all this without demanding too much time. On the other hand, as many have observed, we lost touch with these people for a reason! There was a natural culling; we didn’t keep up with people whom we didn’t like or whose relevance to our lives diminished over time. Now they can find us and have an expectation that we can be found. But for millions of people, the pluses outweigh the minuses. We get news feeds, the equivalent of the town crier or hair salon gossip, delivered to our tablets and phones in a continuous stream. We can tailor those streams to give us contact with what or whom we most care about, our own personal social ticker tape. It’s not a replacement for personal contact but a supplement, an easy way to stay connected to people who are far-flung and, well, just busy.

There is perhaps an illusion in all of this. Social networking provides breadth but rarely depth, and in-person contact is what we crave, even if online contact seems to take away some of that craving. In the end, the online interaction works best as a supplement, not a replacement for in-person contact. The cost of all of our electronic connectedness appears to be that it limits our biological capacity to connect with other people. Another see-saw in which one replaces the other in our attention.

Apart from the minimum drive to be part of a group or social network, many of us seek something more—having friends to do things with, to spend leisure or work time with; a circle of people who understand difficulties we may be encountering and offer assistance when needed; a relationship providing practical help, praise, encouragement, confidences, and loyalty.

Beyond companionship, couples seek intimacy, which can be defined as allowing another person to share and have access to our private behaviors, personal thoughts, joys, hurts, and fears of being hurt. Intimacy also includes creating shared meaning—those inside jokes, that sideways glance that only your sweetie understands—a kind of telepathy. It includes the freedom to be who we are in a relationship (without the need to project a false sense of ourselves) and to allow the other person to do the same. Intimacy allows us to talk openly about things that are important to us, and to take a clear stand on emotionally charged issues without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. All this describes a distinctly Western view—other cultures don’t view intimacy as a necessity or even define it in the same way.

Not surprisingly, men and women have different images of what intimacy entails: Women are more focused than men on commitment and continuity of communication, men on sexual and physical closeness. Intimacy, love, and passion don’t always go together of course—they belong to completely different, multidimensional constructs. We hope friendship and intimacy involve mutual trust, but they don’t always. Just like our chimpanzee cousins, we appear to have an innate tendency to deceive when it is in our own self-interest (the cause of untold amounts of frustration and heartache, not to mention sitcom plots).

Modern intimacy is much more varied, plural, and complex than it was for our ancestors. Throughout history and across cultures, intimacy was rarely regarded with the importance or emphasis we place on it now. For thousands of years—the first 99% of our history—we didn’t do much of anything except procreate and survive. Marriage and pair-bonding (the term that biologists use) was primarily sought for reproduction and for social alliances. Many marriages in historical times took place to create bonds between neighboring tribes as a way to defuse rivalries and tensions over limited resources.

A consequence of changing definitions of intimacy is that today, many of us ask more than ever of our romantic partners. We expect them to be there for emotional support, companionship, intimacy, and financial support, and we expect at various times they will function as confidante, nurse, sounding board, secretary, treasurer, parent, protector, guide, cheerleader, masseuse or masseur, and through it all we expect them to be consistently alluring, sexually appealing, and to stay in lockstep with our own sexual appetites and preferences. We expect our partners to help us achieve our full potential in life. And increasingly they do.

Our increased desire for our partners to do all these things is rooted in a biological need to connect deeply with at least one other person. When it is missing, making such a connection becomes a high priority. When that need is fulfilled by a satisfying intimate relationship, the benefits are both psychological and physiological. People in a relationship experience better health, recover from illnesses more quickly, and live longer. Indeed, the presence of a satisfying intimate relationship is one of the strongest predictors of happiness and emotional well-being that has ever been measured. How do we enter into and maintain intimate relationships? One important factor is the way that personality traits are organized.

Of the thousands of ways that human beings differ from one another, perhaps the most important trait for getting along with others is agreeableness. In the scientific literature, to be agreeable is to be cooperative, friendly, considerate, and helpful—attributes that are more or less stable across the lifetime, and show up early in childhood. Agreeable people are able to control undesirable emotions such as anger and frustration. This control happens in the frontal lobes, which govern impulse control and help us to regulate negative emotions, the same region that governs our executive attention mode. When the frontal lobes are damaged—from injury, stroke, Alzheimer’s, or a tumor, for example—agreeableness is often among the first things to go, along with impulse control and emotional stability. Some of this emotional regulation can be learned—children who receive positive reinforcement for impulse control and anger management become agreeable adults. As you might imagine, being an agreeable person is a tremendous advantage for maintaining positive social relationships.

During adolescence, when behavior is somewhat unpredictable and strongly influenced by interpersonal relations, we react and are guided by what our friends are doing to a much larger degree. Indeed, a sign of maturity is the ability to think independently and come to one’s own conclusions. It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults. And although being agreeable is important for social outcomes later in life, just having a friend who is agreeable also protects against social problems later in life, even if you yourself are not. Both girls and boys benefit from having an agreeable friend, although girls benefit more than boys.

Intimate relationships, including marriage, are subject to what behavioral economists call strong sorting patterns along many different attributes. For example, on average, marriage partners tend to be similar in age, education level, and attractiveness. How do we find each other in an ocean of strangers?

Matchmaking or “romantic partner assistance” is not new. The Bible describes commercial matchmakers from over two thousand years ago, and the first publications to resemble modern newspapers in the early 1700s carried personal advertisements of people (mostly men) looking for a spouse. At various times in history, when people were cut off from potential partners—early settlers of the American West, Civil War soldiers, for example—they took to advertising for partners or responding to ads placed by potential partners, providing a list of attributes or qualities. As the Internet came of age in the 1990s, online dating was introduced as an alternative to personals ads and, in some cases, to matchmakers, via sites that advertised the use of scientific algorithms to increase compatibility scores.

The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships, compared to a fraction of that in the decade before. Half of these marriages began on dating sites, the rest via social media, chat rooms, instant messages, and the like. In 1995, it was still so rare for a marriage to have begun online that newspapers would report it, breathlessly, as something weirdly futuristic and kind of freakish.

This behavioral change isn’t so much because the Internet itself or the dating options have changed; it’s because the population of Internet users has changed. Online dating used to be stigmatized as a creepier extension of the somewhat seedy world of 1960s and 1970s personal ads—the last resort for the desperate or undatable. The initial stigma associated with online dating became irrelevant as a new generation of users emerged for whom online contact was already well known, respectable, and established. And, like fax machines and e-mail, the system works only when a large number of people use it. This started to occur around 1999–2000. By 2014, twenty years after the introduction of online dating, younger users have a higher probability of embracing it because they have been active users of the Internet since they were little children, for education, shopping, entertainment, games, socializing, looking for a job, getting news and gossip, watching videos, and listening to music.

As already noted, the Internet has helped some of us to become more social and to establish and maintain a larger number of relationships. For others, particularly heavy Internet users who are introverted to begin with, the Internet has led them to become less socially involved, lonelier, and more likely to become depressed. Studies have shown a dramatic decline in empathy among college students, who apparently are far less likely to say that it is valuable to put oneself in the place of others or to try and understand their feelings. It is not just because they’re reading less literary fiction, it’s because they’re spending more time alone under the illusion that they’re being social.

Online dating is organized differently from conventional dating in four key ways—access, communication, matching, and asynchrony. Online dating gives us access to a much larger and broader set of potential mates than we would have encountered in our pre-Internet lives. The field of eligibles used to be limited to people we knew, worked with, worshipped with, went to school with, or lived near. Many dating sites boast millions of users, dramatically increasing the size of the pool. In fact, the roughly two billion people who are connected to the Internet are potentially accessible. Naturally, access to millions of profiles doesn’t necessarily mean access to electronic or face-to-face encounters; it simply allows users to see who else is available, even though the availables may not be reciprocally interested in you.

The communication medium of online dating allows us to get to know the person, review a broad range of facts, and exchange information before the stress of meeting face-to-face, and perhaps to avoid an awkward face-to-face meeting if things aren’t going well. Matching typically occurs via mathematical algorithms to help us select potential partners, screening out those who have undesirable traits or lack of shared interests.

Asynchrony allows both parties to gather their thoughts in their own time before responding, and thus to present their best selves without all of the pressure and anxiety that occurs in synchronous real-time interactions. Have you ever left a conversation only to realize hours later the thing you wish you had said? Online dating solves that.

Taken together, these four key features that distinguish Internet dating are not always desirable. For one thing, there is a disconnect between what people find attractive in a profile and what they find in meeting a person face-to-face. And, as Northwestern University psychologist Eli Finkel points out, this streamlined access to a pool of thousands of potential partners “can elicit an evaluative, assessment-oriented mind-set that leads online daters to objectify potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one of them.”

It can also cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions due to cognitive and decision overload. We know from behavioral economics—and decisions involving cars, appliances, houses, and yes, even potential mates—that consumers can’t keep track of more than two or three variables of interest when evaluating a large number of alternatives. This is directly related to the capacity limitations of working memory, discussed in Chapter 2. It’s also related to limitations of our attentional network. When considering dating alternatives, we necessarily need to get our minds to shuttle back and forth between the central executive mode—keeping track of all those little details—and the daydreaming mode, the mode in which we try to picture ourselves with each of the attractive alternatives: what our life would be like, how good they’ll feel on our arm, whether they’ll get along with our friends, and what our children will look like with his or her nose. As you now know, all that rapid switching between central executive calculating and dreamy mind-wandering depletes neural resources, leading us to make poor decisions. And when cognitive resources are low, we have difficulty focusing on relevant information and ignoring the irrelevant. Maybe online dating is a form of social organization that has gone off the rails, rendering decision-making more difficult rather than less.

Staying in any committed, monogamous relationship, whether it began online or off, requires fidelity, or “forgoing the forbidden fruit.” This is known to be a function of the availability of attractive alternatives. The twist with the advent of online dating, however, is that there can be many thousands of times more in the virtual world than in the off-line world, creating a situation where temptation can exceed willpower for both men and women. Stories of people (usually men) who “forgot” to take their dating profile down after meeting and beginning a serious relationship with someone are legion.

With one-third of people who get married meeting online, the science of online courtship has recently come into its own. Researchers have shown what we all suspected: Online daters engage in deception; 81% lie about their height, weight, or age. Men tend to lie about height, women about weight. Both lie about their age. In one study, age discrepancies of ten years were observed, weight was underreported by thirty-five pounds, and height was overreported by two inches. It’s not as though these things would be undiscovered upon meeting in person, which makes the misrepresentations more odd. And apparently, in the online world, political leaning is more sensitive and less likely to be disclosed than age, height, or weight. Online daters are significantly more likely to admit they’re fat than that they’re Republicans.

In the vast majority of these cases, the liars are aware of the lies they’re telling. What motivates them? Because of the large amount of choice that online daters have, the profile results from an underlying tension between wanting to be truthful and wanting to put one’s best face forward. Profiles often misrepresent the way you were sometime in the recent past (e.g., employed) or the way you’d like to be (e.g., ten pounds thinner and six years younger).

Social world organization gone awry or not, the current online dating world shows at least one somewhat promising trend: So far, there is a 22% lower risk of marriages that began online ending in divorce. But while that may sound impressive, the actual effect is tiny: Meeting online reduces the overall risk of divorce from 7.7% to 6%. If all the couples who met off-line met online instead, only 1 divorce for every 100 marriages would be prevented. Also, couples who met on the Web tend to be more educated and are more likely to be employed than couples who met in person, and educational attainment and employment tend to predict marital longevity. So the observed effect may not be due to Internet dating per se, but to the fact that Internet daters tend to be more educated and employed, as a group, than conventional daters.

As you might expect, couples who initially met via e-mail tend to be older than couples who met their spouse through social networks and virtual worlds. (Young people just don’t use e-mail very much anymore.) And like DARPA, Wikipedia, and Kickstarter, online dating sites that use crowdsourcing have cropped up. ChainDate, ReportYourEx, and the Lulu app are just three examples of a kind of Zagat-like rating system for dating partners.

Once we are in a relationship, romantic or platonic, how well do we know the people we care about, and how good are we at knowing their thoughts? Surprisingly bad. We are barely better than 50/50 in assessing how our friends and coworkers feel about us, or whether they even like us. Speed daters are lousy at assessing who wants to date them and who does not (so much for intuition). On the one hand, couples who thought they knew each other well correctly guessed their partner’s reactions four out of ten times—on the other hand, they thought they were getting eight out of ten correct. In another experiment, volunteers watched videos of people either lying or telling the truth about whether they were HIV positive. People believed that they were accurate in detecting liars 70% of the time, but in fact, they did no better than 50%. We are very bad at telling if someone is lying, even when our lives depend on it.

This has potentially grave consequences for foreign policy. The British believed Adolf Hitler’s assurance in 1938 that peace would be preserved if he was given the land just over the Czech border. Thus the British discouraged the Czechs from mobilizing their army. But Hitler was lying, having already prepared his army to invade. The opposite misreading of intentions occurred when the United States believed Saddam Hussein was lying about not having any weapons of mass destruction—in fact, he was telling the truth.

Outside of military or strategic contexts, where lying is used as a tactic, why do people lie in everyday interactions? One reason is fear of reprisal when we’ve done something we shouldn’t. It is not the better part of human nature, but it is human nature to lie to avoid punishment. And it starts early—six-year-olds will say, “I didn’t do it,” while they’re in the middle of doing it! Workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the gulf waters off of Louisiana knew of safety problems but were afraid to report them for fear of being fired.

But it is also human nature to forgive, especially when we’re given an explanation. In one study, people who tried to cut in line were forgiven by others even if their explanation was ridiculous. In a line for a copy machine, “I’m sorry, may I cut in? I need to make copies” was every bit as effective as “I’m sorry, may I cut in? I’m on deadline.”

When doctors at the University of Michigan hospitals started disclosing their mistakes to patients openly, malpractice lawsuits were cut in half. The biggest impediment to resolution had been requiring patients to imagine what their doctors were thinking, and having to sue to find out, rather than just allowing doctors to explain how a mistake happened. When we’re confronted with the human element, the doctor’s constraints and what she is struggling with, we’re more likely to understand and forgive. Nicholas Epley, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (and author of Mindwise), writes, “If being transparent strengthens the social ties that make life worth living, and enables others to forgive our shortcomings, why not do it more often?”

People lie for other reasons of course, not just fear of reprisals. Some of these include avoiding hurting other people’s feelings, and sometimes little white lies become the social glue that prevents tempers from flaring and minimizes antagonism. In this context, we are surprisingly good at telling when people are lying, and we go along with it, cooperatively, every day. It has to do with the gentle way we ask for things when we want to avoid confrontations with people—indirect speech acts.

Why People Are Indirect with Us

A large part of human social interaction requires that we subdue our innate primate hostilities in order to get along. Although primates in general are among the most social species, there are few examples of primate living groups that support more than eighteen males within the group—the interpersonal tensions and dominance hierarchies just become too much for them and they split apart. And yet humans have been living in cities containing tens of thousands of males for several millennia. How do we do it? One way of helping to keep large numbers of humans living in close proximity is through the use of nonconfrontational speech, or indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts don’t say what we actually want, but they imply it. The philosopher Paul Grice called these implicatures.

Suppose John and Marsha are both sitting in an office, and Marsha’s next to the window. John feels hot. He could say, “Open the window,” which is direct and may make Marsha feel a little weird. If they’re workplace equals, who is John to tell Marsha what to do or to boss her around, she might think. If instead John says, “Gosh, it’s getting warm in here,” he is inviting her into a cooperative venture, a simple but not trivial unwrapping of what he said. He is implying his desire in a nondirective and nonconfrontational manner. Normally, Marsha plays along by inferring that he’d like her to open the window, and that he’s not simply making a meteorological observation. At this point, Marsha has several response choices:

a. She smiles back at John and opens the window, signaling that she’s playing this little social game and that she’s cooperating with the charade’s intent.

b. She says, “Oh really? I’m actually kind of chilly.” This signals that she is still playing the game but that they have a difference of opinion about the basic facts. Marsha’s being cooperative, though expressing a different viewpoint. Cooperative behavior on John’s part at this point requires him to either drop the subject or to up the ante, which risks raising levels of confrontation and aggression.

c. Marsha can say, “Oh yes—it is.” Depending on how she says it, John might take her response as flirtatious and playful, or sarcastic and rude. In the former case, she’s inviting John to be more explicit, effectively signaling that they can drop this subterfuge; their relationship is solid enough that she is giving John permission to be direct. In the latter case, if Marsha uses a sarcastic tone of voice, she’s indicating that she agrees with the premise—it’s hot in there—but she doesn’t want to open the window herself.

d. Marsha can say, “Why don’t you take off your sweater.” This is noncooperative and a bit confrontational—Marsha is opting out of the game.

e. Marsha can say, “I was hot, too, until I took off my sweater. I guess the heating system finally kicked in.” This is less confrontational. Marsha is agreeing with the premise but not the implication of what should be done about it. It is partly cooperative in that she is helping John to solve the problem, though not in the way he intended.

f. Marsha can say, “Screw you.” This signals that she doesn’t want to play the implicature game, and moreover, she is conveying aggression. John’s options are limited at this point—either he can ignore her (effectively backing down) or he can up the ante by getting up, stomping past her desk, and forcefully opening the damn window. (Now it’s war.)

The simplest cases of speech acts are those in which the speaker utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says. Yet indirect speech acts are a powerful social glue that enables us to get along. In them, the speaker means exactly what she says but also something more. The something more is supposed to be apparent to the hearer, and yet it remains unspoken. Hence, the act of uttering an indirect speech act can be seen as inherently an act of play, an invitation to cooperate in a game of verbal hide-and-seek of “Do you understand what I’m saying?” The philosopher John Searle says the mechanism by which indirect speech acts work is that they invoke in both the speaker and the hearer a shared representation of the world; they rely on shared background information that is both linguistic and social. By appealing to their shared knowledge, the speaker and listener are creating a pact and affirming their shared worldview.

Searle asks us to consider another type of case with two speakers, A and B.

A: Let’s go to the movies tonight.

B: I have to study for an exam tonight.

Speaker A is not making an implicature—it can be taken at face value as a direct request, as marked by the use of let’s. But Speaker B’s reply is clearly indirect. It is meant to communicate both a literal message (“I’m studying for an exam tonight”) and an unspoken implicature (“Therefore I can’t go to the movies”). Most people agree that B is employing a gentler way of resolving a potential conflict between the two people by avoiding confrontation. If instead, B said

B1: No.

speaker A feels rejected, and without any cause or explanation. Our fear of rejection is understandably very strong; in fact, social rejection causes activation in the same part of the brain as physical pain does, and—perhaps surprisingly and accordingly—Tylenol can reduce people’s experience of social pain.

Speaker B makes the point in a cooperative framework, and by providing an explanation, she implies that she really would like to go, but simply cannot. This is equivalent to the person cutting in line to make copies and providing a meaningless explanation that is better received than no explanation at all. But not all implicatures are created equal. If instead, B had said

B2: I have to wash my hair tonight.

or

B3: I’m in the middle of a game of solitaire that I really must finish.

then B is expecting that A will understand these as rejections, and offers no explanatory niceties—a kind of conversational slap in the face, albeit one that extends the implicature game. B2 and B3 constitute slightly gentler ways of refusing than B1 because they do not involve blatant and outright contradiction.

Searle extends the analysis of indirect speech acts to include utterances whose meaning may be thoroughly indecipherable but whose intent, if we’re lucky, is one hundred percent clear. He asks us to consider the following. Suppose you are an American soldier captured by the Italians during World War II while out of uniform. Now, in order to get them to release you, you devise a plan to convince them that you are a German officer. You could say to them in Italian, “I am a German officer,” but they might not believe it. Suppose further that you don’t speak enough Italian in the first place to say that.

The ideal utterance in this case would be for you to say, in perfect German, “I am a German officer. Release me, and be quick about it.” Suppose, though, that you don’t know enough German to say that, and all you know is one line that you learned from a German poem in high school: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?” which means “Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?” If your Italian captors don’t speak any German, your saying “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?” has the effect of communicating that you are German. In other words, the literal meaning of your speech act becomes irrelevant, and only the implied meaning is at work. The Italians hear what they recognize only as German, and you hope they will make the logical leap that you must indeed be German and therefore worthy of release.

Another aspect of communication is that information can become updated through social contracts. You might mention to your friend Bert that Ernie said such-and-such, but Bert adds the new information that we now know Ernie’s a liar and can’t be trusted. We learned that Pluto is no longer a planet when a duly authorized panel, empowered by society to make such decisions and judgments, said so. Certain utterances have, by social contract, the authority to change the state of the world. A doctor who pronounces you dead changes your legal status instantly, which has the effect of utterly changing your life, whether you’re in fact dead or not. A judge can pronounce you innocent or guilty and, again, the truth doesn’t matter as much as the force of the pronouncement, in terms of what your future looks like. The set of utterances that can so change the state of the world is limited, but they are powerful. We empower these legal or quasi-legal authorities in order to facilitate our understanding of the social world.

Except for these formal and legalistic pronouncements, Grice and Searle take as a premise that virtually all conversations are a cooperative undertaking and that they require both literal and implied meanings to be processed. Grice systematized and categorized the various rules by which ordinary, cooperative speech is conducted, helping to illuminate the mechanisms by which indirect speech acts work. The four Gricean maxims are:

1. Quantity. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as required. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
2. Quality. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3. Manner. Avoid obscurity of expression (don’t use words that your intended hearer doesn’t know). Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.
4. Relation. Make your contribution relevant.

The following three examples demonstrate violations of maxim 1, quantity, where the second speaker is not making a contribution that is informative enough:

A: Where are you going this afternoon?

B: Out.

A: How was your day?

B: Fine.

A: What did you learn in school today?

B: Nothing.

Even if we don’t know about Gricean maxims, we intuitively recognize these replies as being noncooperative. The first speaker in each case is implying that he would like a certain level of detail in response to his query, and the second speaker is opting out of any cooperative agreement of the sort.

As another example, suppose Professor Kaplan is writing a recommendation for a pupil who is applying to graduate school.

“Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is fine and his attendance in my class has been regular. Very truly yours, Professor Kaplan.”

By violating the maxim of quantity—not providing enough information—Professor Kaplan is implying that Mr. X is not a very good student, without actually saying it.

Here’s an example of the other extreme, in which the second speaker provides too much information:

A: Dad, where’s the hammer?

B: On the floor, two inches from the garage door, lying in a puddle of water where you left it three hours ago after I told you to put it back in the toolbox.

The second speaker in this case, by providing too much information, is implying more than the facts of the utterance, and is signaling annoyance.

A is standing by an obviously immobilized car when B walks by.

A: I’m out of gas.

B: There’s a garage just about a quarter mile down the street.

B is violating the maxim of quality if, in fact, there is no garage down the street, or if the speaker knows that the garage is open but has no gasoline. Suppose B wants to steal the tires from A’s car. A assumes that B is being truthful, and so walks off, giving B enough time to jack up the car and unmount a tire or two.

A: Where’s Bill?

B: There’s a yellow VW outside Sue’s house. . . .

B flouts the maxim of relevance, suggesting that A is to make an inference. A now has two choices:

1. Accept B’s statement as flouting the maxim of relevance, and as an invitation to cooperate. A says (to himself): Bill drives a yellow VW. Bill knows Sue. Bill must be at Sue’s house (and B doesn’t want to come right out and say so for some reason; perhaps this is a delicate matter or B promised not to tell).
2. Withdraw from B’s proposed dialogue and repeat the original question, “Yes, but where’s Bill?”

Of course B has other possible responses to the question “Where’s Bill?”:

B1: At Sue’s house. (no implicature)

B2: Well, I saw a VW parked at Sue’s house, and Bill drives a VW. (a mild implicature, filling in most of the blanks for A)

B3: What an impertinent question! (direct, somewhat confrontational)

B4: I’m not supposed to tell you. (less direct, still somewhat confrontational)

B5: I have no idea. (violating quality)

B6: [Turns away] (opting out of conversation)

Indirect speech acts such as these reflect the way we actually use language in everyday speech. There is nothing unfamiliar about these exchanges. The great contribution of Grice and Searle was that they organized the exchanges, putting them into a system whereby we can analyze and understand how they function. This all occurs at a subconscious level for most of us. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders often have difficulty with indirect speech acts because of biological differences in their brains that make it difficult for them to understand irony, pretense, sarcasm, or any nonliteral speech. Are there neurochemical correlates to getting along and keeping social bonds intact?

There’s a hormone in the brain released by the back half of the pituitary gland, oxytocin, that has been called by the popular press the love hormone, because it used to be thought that oxytocin is what causes people to fall in love with each other. When a person has an orgasm, oxytocin is released, and one of the effects of oxytocin is to make us feel bonded to others. Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that this was nature’s way of causing couples to want to stay together after sex to raise any children that might result from that sex. In other words, it is clearly an evolutionary advantage for a child to have two caring, nurturing parents. If the parents feel bonded to each other through oxytocin release, they are more likely to share in the raising of their children, thus propagating their tribe.

In addition to difficulty understanding any speech that isn’t literal, individuals with autism spectrum disorders don’t feel attachment to people the way others do, and they have difficulty empathizing with others. Oxytocin in individuals with autism shows up at lower than normal levels, and the administration of oxytocin causes them to become more social, and improves emotion recognition. (It also reduces their repetitive behaviors.)

Oxytocin has additionally been implicated in feelings of trust. In a typical experiment, people watch politicians making speeches. The observers are under the influence of oxytocin for half the speeches they watch, and a placebo for the other half (of course they don’t know which is which). When asked to rate whom they trust the most, or whom they would be most likely to vote for, people select the candidates they viewed while oxytocin was in their system.

There’s a well-established finding that people who receive social support during illness (simple caring and nurturing) recover more fully and more quickly. This simple social contact when we’re sick also releases oxytocin, in turn helping to improve health outcomes by reducing stress levels and the hormone cortisol, which can cripple the immune system.

Paradoxically, levels of oxytocin also increase during gaps in social support or poor social functioning (thus absence does make the heart grow fonder—or at least more attached). Oxytocin may therefore act as a distress signal prompting the individual to seek out social contact. To reconcile this paradox—is oxytocin the love drug or the without-love drug?—a more recent theory gaining traction is that oxytocin regulates the salience of social information and is capable of eliciting positive and negative social emotions, depending on the situation and individual. Its real role is to organize social behavior. Promising preliminary evidence suggests that oxytocin pharmacotherapy can help to promote trust and reduce social anxiety, including in people with social phobia and borderline personality disorder. Nondrug therapies, such as music, may exert similar therapeutic effects via oxytocinergic regulation; music has been shown to increase oxytocin levels, especially when people listen to or play music together.

A related chemical in the brain, a protein called arginine vasopressin, has also been found to regulate affiliation, sociability, and courtship. If you think your social behaviors are largely under your conscious control, you’re underestimating the role of neurochemicals in shaping your thoughts, feelings, and actions. To wit: There are two species of prairie voles; one is monogamous, the other is not. Inject vasopressin in the philandering voles and they become monogamous; block vasopressin in the monogamous ones and they become as randy as Gene Simmons in a John Holmes movie.

Injecting vasopressin also causes innate, aggressive behaviors to become more selective, protecting the mate from emotional (and physical) outbursts.

Recreational drugs such as cannabis and LSD have been found to promote feelings of connection between people who take those drugs and others, and in many cases, a feeling of being more connected to the world-as-a-whole. The active ingredient in marijuana activates specialized neural receptors called cannabinoid receptors, and it has been shown experimentally in rats that they increase social activity (when the rats could get up off the couch). LSD’s action in the brain includes stimulating dopamine and certain serotonin receptors while attenuating sensory input from the visual cortex (which may be partly responsible for visual hallucinations). Yet the reason LSD causes feelings of social connection is not yet known.

In order to feel socially connected to others, we like to think we know them, and that to some extent we can predict their behavior. Take a moment to think about someone you know well—a close friend, family member, spouse, and so on, and rate that person according to the three options below.

The person I am thinking of tends to be:

a.	subjective	analytic	depends on the situation
b.	energetic	relaxed	depends on the situation
c.	dignified	casual	depends on the situation
d.	quiet	talkative	depends on the situation
e.	cautious	bold	depends on the situation
f.	lenient	firm	depends on the situation
g.	intense	calm	depends on the situation
h.	realistic	idealistic	depends on the situation

Now go back and rate yourself on the same items.

Most people rate their friend in terms of traits (the first two columns)but rate themselves in terms of situations (the third column). Why? Because by definition, we see only the public actions of others. For our own behaviors, we have access not just to the public actions but to our private actions, private feelings, and private thoughts as well. Our own lives seem to us to be more filled with rich diversity of thoughts and behaviors because we are experiencing a wider range of behaviors in ourselves while effectively having only one-sided evidence about others. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls this the “invisibility” problem—the inner thoughts of others are invisible to us.

In Chapter 1, cognitive illusions were compared to visual illusions. They are a window into the inner workings of the mind and brain, and reveal to us some of the substructure that supports cognition and perception. Like visual illusions, cognitive illusions are automatic—that is, even when we know they exist, it is difficult or impossible to turn off the mental machinery that gives rise to them. Cognitive illusions lead us to misperceive reality and to make poor decisions about choices we are presented with, medical options, and interpreting the behaviors of other people, particularly those who comprise our social world. Misinterpreting the motivations of others leads to misunderstandings, suspicion, and interpersonal conflict and, in the worst cases, war. Fortunately, many cognitive illusions can be overcome with training.

One of the most well established findings in social psychology concerns how we interpret the actions of others, and it’s related to the demonstration above. There are two broad classes of explanation for why people do what they do—dispositional or situational. Dispositional explanations embrace the idea that all of us have certain traits (dispositions) that are more or less stable across our lifetimes. As you just saw, we have a tendency to describe the people we know in trait terms: They’re extroverts or introverts, agreeable or disagreeable, the life of the party or a stick-in-the-mud.

Situational explanations, on the other hand, acknowledge that momentary circumstances sometimes contribute to our responses and can override any innate predispositions. These oppositional approaches are sometimes characterized as “the person versus the situation.” Dispositional explanations say, “I was born (or made) that way.” Situational ones (to quote comedian Flip Wilson) say, “The devil made me do it.”

In one famous study, students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to come into an office to provide their opinions on “religious education and vocations.” After they had filled out a series of questionnaires, the experimenter explained that questionnaires tend to be oversimplified, and so for the final part of the study, the students would be asked to record a three- to five-minute talk based on a short piece of text. The students were then given one of two things to read, either a paragraph exploring whether “ministering” can be effective within the professional clergy these days, or the parable of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament (who stopped to help an injured man after a priest and a Levite had passed him by on the road).

Now, in social psychology experiments, things are not usually as they seem—the experimenters go to great lengths to hide what they’re really up to, in order to reduce the possibility that participants will be able to tailor their behavior to the experiment. In this case, the experimenter told the participants that space was tight in the building they were in, and consequently he had made arrangements for the talk to be recorded in an office building next door (this was part of the deception). The experimenter then drew a map for the participants, showing them how to get there.

Thirteen participants in each reading group were told that they should hurry because an assistant in the adjacent building had expected them a few minutes earlier. Thirteen others were told, “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over.” This constitutes a situational factor—some students are in a hurry, some are not. Some people are more helpful than others, a dispositional trait that we assume is more or less stable across a person’s lifetime. But this particular group—seminary students—are no doubt more helpful than the average person because they are studying to become members of the clergy, a helping profession. We assume that differences in the traits of helpfulness and compassion are minimized in this particular population, and moreover, any remaining individual differences would be evenly distributed across the two conditions of the study because the experimenters randomly assigned students to one condition or the other. The design of the experiment cleverly pits dispositional against situational factors.

Between the two Princeton campus buildings, the experimenters had placed a confederate—a research assistant—who sat slumped in a doorway and who appeared to be in need of medical attention. When each theological student passed by, the confederate coughed and groaned.

If you believe that a person’s traits are the best predictor of behavior, you would predict that all or most of the seminary students would stop and help this injured person. And, as an added, elegant twist to the experiment, half have just read the story of the Good Samaritan who stopped to help someone in a situation very much like this.

What did the experimenters find? The students who were in a hurry were six times more likely to keep on walking and pass by the visibly injured person without helping than the students who had plenty of time. The amount of time the students had was the situational factor that predicted how they would behave, and the paragraph they read had no significant effect.

This finding comes as a surprise to most people. There have been dozens of demonstrations of people making incorrect predictions, overweighting the influence of traits and undervaluing the power of the situation when attempting to explain people’s behavior. This cognitive illusion is so powerful it has a name: the fundamental attribution error. An additional part of the fundamental attribution error is that we fail to appreciate that the roles people are forced to play in certain situations constrain their behavior.

In a clever demonstration of this, Lee Ross and his colleagues staged a mock game show at Stanford. Ross plucked a handful of students from his classroom and randomly assigned half of them to be Questioners and half to be Contestants in a trivia game. The Questioners were asked to come up with general knowledge questions that were difficult but not impossible to answer—they could draw from any area in which they had an interest or expertise—for example, movies, books, sports, music, literature, their coursework, or something they read in the news. Ross reminded them that they each had some knowledge that was likely not held by everyone in the classroom. Perhaps they collected coins, and a fair question might have to do with what years the United States minted pennies out of steel instead of copper. Or perhaps they were taking an elective course on Virginia Woolf in the English Department and a fair question might be what decade “A Room of One’s Own” was published in. An unfair question would be something like “What was the name of my second-grade teacher?”

The Questioners then stood in front of the class and asked the Contestants the questions as the rest of the class looked on. They mined general knowledge, trivia, and factoids such as we see on television game shows like Jeopardy!, questions such as “What do the initials in W. H. Auden’s name stand for?”; “What is the current form of government in Sri Lanka?”; “What is the longest glacier in the world?”; “Who was the first runner to break the four-minute mile”; and “What team won the 1969 World Series?”

The Contestants did not do particularly well in answering the questions. A crucial point here is that the manipulation about who was a Questioner and who was a Contestant was made obvious to all concerned, because it was by random assignment. After the game was over, Ross asked the observers in the class to answer the following questions: “On a scale of one to ten, how smart would you say the Questioner was compared to the average Stanford student?” and “On a scale of one to ten, how smart would you say the Contestant was compared to the average Stanford student?”

We humans are hardwired to attend to individual differences. This probably served us well throughout evolutionary history as we made decisions about whom to mate with, whom to go hunting with, and whom to trust as allies. Traits such as nurturing, affectionate, emotionally stable, reliable, trustworthy, and intelligent would have been important criteria. If we were sitting in Lee Ross’s Stanford class, observing this mock game show, our overwhelming impression would likely be surprise at all the arcane knowledge displayed by the Questioners—how could they know so much? And about so many different things? It wasn’t just the Contestants who didn’t know the answers to the questions; most of the observers didn’t either!

An important feature of the experiment is that it was designed to confer a self-presentation advantage upon the Questioners relative to the Contestants or observers. When Ross tallied the data, he found that the observer students in the classroom rated the Questioners to be genuinely smarter than the average Stanford student. Moreover, they rated the Contestants to be below average. The raters were attributing the performance they observed to stable dispositions. What they were failing to do—the cognitive illusion—was to realize that the role played by the Questioners virtually guaranteed that they would appear knowledgeable, and similarly, the role played by the Contestants virtually guaranteed that they would seem ignorant. The role of Questioner conferred a great advantage, an opportunity to make a self-serving, image-building display. No right-minded Questioner would ask a question that he didn’t already know the answer to, and because he was encouraged to generate difficult and obscure questions, it was unlikely the Contestant would know many of the answers.

Not only was the game rigged, but so were the mental reactions of the participants—indeed, the mental responses of all of us. We succumb to the cognitive illusion of the fundamental attribution error regularly. Knowing that it exists can help us to overcome it. Suppose you’re walking down the halls of your office and pass a new coworker, Kevin. You say hello and he doesn’t respond. You could attribute his behavior to a stable personality trait and conclude that he is shy or that he is rude. Or you could attribute his behavior to a situational factor—perhaps he was lost in thought or was late for a meeting or is angry at you. The science doesn’t say that Kevin rarely responds to situational factors, just that observers tend to discount them. Daniel Gilbert has gone on to show that this fundamental attribution error is produced by information overload. Specifically, the more cognitive load one is experiencing, the more likely one is to make errors in judgment about the causes of an individual’s behavior.

Another way to contextualize the results of the Stanford experiment is that the participants drew a conclusion that was overly influenced by the outcome of the game, and made an outcome-bias-based inference. If you hear that Jolie passed a difficult college course and Martina failed it, you might conclude that Jolie is smarter, worked harder, or is a better student. Most people would. The outcome appears to be a cogent indicator of something related to academic ability. But what if you found out that Jolie and Martina had different instructors for the class? Both Jolie and Martina got an equal number of questions correct on their exams, but Jolie’s instructor was lenient and passed everyone in the class, while Martina’s instructor was strict and failed nearly everyone. Even knowing this, outcome bias is so powerful that people continue to conclude that Jolie is smarter. Why is it so powerful if it is sometimes wrong?

Here’s the twist. It’s because most of the time, the outcome has predictive value and operates as a simple inferential cue when we’re making judgments. Reliance on such primal unconscious cues is efficient, typically yielding accurate judgments with much less effort and cognitive load. In an era of information overload, sometimes outcome-based biases save time, but we need to be aware of them because sometimes they just make us wrong.

On the Edge of Your Social World

Another cognitive illusion that concerns social judgments is that we tend to have a very difficult time ignoring information that has been shown later to be false. Suppose you’re trying to decide between job A and job B; you’ve been offered positions in both companies at the same rate of pay. You start making inquiries, and a friend tells you that the people at company A are very difficult to get along with and that, moreover, there have been a number of sexual harassment suits filed against the company’s management. It’s very natural to start reviewing in your mind all the people you met at company A, trying to imagine who is difficult and who might have been implicated in the harassment claims. A few days later, you and your friend are talking, and your friend apologizes, saying that she confused company A with a different company with a similar name—the evidence on which your first conclusion was made has been summarily removed. Dozens of experiments have shown that the original knowledge—now known to be false—exerts a lingering influence on your judgments; it is impossible to hit the reset button. Lawyers know this well, and often plant the seeds of a false idea in the minds of jurors and judges. After opposing counsel objects, the judge’s admonition, “The jury will disregard that last exchange,” comes too late to affect impression formation and judgment.

A vivid example of this comes from another experiment by psychologist Stuart Valins. This experiment shows its age—the 1960s—and is not even remotely politically correct by today’s standards. But the data it provided are valid and have been robustly replicated in dozens of conceptually similar studies.

Undergraduate men were brought into the laboratory to take part, they were told, in an experiment on what the average college man considers to be attractive in a woman. They were placed in a chair and wired up with electrodes on their arms and a microphone on their chests. The experimenter explained that the electrodes and microphone would measure physiological arousal in response to a set of Playboy magazine centerfolds that they would be shown one at a time. Each participant saw the same pictures as every other participant, but in a different order. A loudspeaker played back the sounds of the participants’ heartbeat. One by one, the participants looked at the pictures displayed by the experimenter, and the audible heartbeat clearly increased or decreased in response to how attractive the men found each woman’s picture.

Unbeknownst to the participants, the electrodes on their arms and the microphone on their chests were not connected to the loudspeaker—it was all a ruse. The heartbeat they thought they heard was actually a tape recording of a synthesizer pulse, and the fluctuations in rate had been predetermined by the experimenter. When the experiment was over, the experimenter showed them that the heartbeat sounds were, in fact, synthesized pulses, and not at all tied to the participant’s own heartbeat. The experimenter showed the participants the tape recorder playback system, and that the chest microphone and arm electrodes were not actually hooked up to anything.

Consider this from the participant’s point of view. For a brief moment, he was given the impression that real physiological responses of his body showed that he found a particular woman particularly attractive. Now the evidence for that impression has been completely annulled. Logically, if he were engaging in rational decision-making, he’d hit the reset button on his impressions and conclude that there was no reason to trust the sound coming out of the speakers. The payoff of the experiment came next, when the experimenter allowed the participant to select pictures to take home as compensation for helping out with the experiment. Which pictures did the men pick? Overwhelmingly, they chose the pictures for which the loudspeaker played the highest heart rate. The belief they held, and for which all evidence was now removed, persevered, clouding their judgment. Valins believes that the mechanism by which this occurs is self-persuasion. People invest a significant amount of cognitive effort generating a belief that is consistent with the physiological state they are experiencing. Having done so, the results of this process are relatively persistent and resistant to change, but they do represent an insidious error of judgment. Nicholas Epley says that we are unaware of the construction of our beliefs and the mental processes that lead to them, in most cases. Consequently, even when evidence is explicitly removed, the beliefs persist.

Belief perseverance shows up in everyday life with gossip. Gossip is nothing new of course. It is among the earliest human foibles documented in writing, in the Old Testament and other ancient sources from the dawn of literacy. Humans gossip for many reasons: It can help us feel superior to others when we are otherwise feeling insecure about ourselves. It can help us to forge bonds with others to test their allegiance—if Tiffany is willing to join in the gossip with me against Britney, I can perhaps count on Tiffany as an ally. The problem with gossip is that it can be false. This is especially the case when the gossip is passed through the ears and mouths of several people, each of whom embellishes it. Due to belief perseverance, faulty social information, based on an outright lie or a distortion of the facts, can be very difficult to eradicate. And careers and social relationships can become difficult to repair afterward.

In addition to our brains holding an innate predisposition toward making trait attributions and enjoying gossip, humans tend to be innately suspicious of outsiders, where an outsider is anyone different from us. “Different from us” can be described by many dimensions and qualities: religion, skin color, hometown, the school from which we graduated, our income level, the political party we belong to, the kinds of music we listen to, the athletic team we root for. In high schools all around America, students tend to break off into cliques based on some salient (to them) dimension of difference. The primary dividing dimension is typically between students who affiliate with and buy into the whole idea that school will help them, and those who, for reasons of background, family experience, or socioeconomic status, believe that school is a waste of time. Beyond this primary division, high schoolers typically break into dozens of subcliques based on further partitioning of what constitutes “people like us.”

This partitioning of social group membership arises at a time when our brains and bodies are undergoing dramatic neural and hormonal changes. Socially, we are coming to understand that we can have our own tastes and desires. We don’t have to like what our parents like or say we should like—we explore and subsequently develop and refine our own tastes in music, clothing, films, books, and activities. This is a factor in why elementary schools tend to have relatively few social groups or extracurricular clubs and why high schools have so many.

But along with the many other cognitive illusions that lead to faulty social judgments is a phenomenon known as the in-group/out-group bias. We tend—erroneously of course—to think of people who are members of our group, whatever that group may be, as individuals, while we think of members of out-groups as a less well differentiated collective. That is, when asked to judge how disparate are the interests, personalities, and proclivities of the people in our group (the in-group) versus another group (the out-group), we tend to overestimate the similarities of out-group members.

So, for example, if Democrats are asked to describe how similar Democrats are to one another, they might say something like “Oh, Democrats come from all walks of life—we’re a very diverse group.” If then asked to describe Republicans, they might say, “Oh, those Republicans—all they care about is lower taxes. They’re all alike.” We also tend to prefer members of our own group. In general, a group will be perceived differently, and more accurately, by its own members than by outsiders.

In-group and out-group effects have a neurobiological basis. Within an area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, there is a group of neurons that fire when we think about ourselves and people who are like us. This neural network is related to the daydreaming mode described in Chapter 2—the daydreaming mode is active when we think about ourselves in relation to others, and when we engage in perspective taking.

One plausible explanation for in-group/out-group effects is that they are merely a product of exposure—we know lots of different people in our group and we know them better than we know the people in the other group. This has to be true by definition; we associate with members of the in-group and not the out-group. Therefore, on a regular basis, we’re confronted with the complexity and diversity of our friends, whom we know well, and while we wrongly believe that the people we don’t know are less complex and diverse. We’re better able to engage the medial prefrontal cortex with in-group members because their behaviors are simply easier for our brains to visualize in all their nuance.

But this hypothesis is contradicted by the striking fact that what constitutes an in-group or out-group can be defined on the flimsiest of premises, such as which of two randomly defined groups won a coin toss. One criterion for having a sense of group belongingness is interdependence of fate. After establishing common fate by the coin toss—one group would win a small prize and the other would not—students in an experiment were then asked to judge how similar or different members of each group were. There was a robust in-group/out-group effect even in this ad hoc grouping. Members of the in-group reported that people in their group—people they had just met—had more desirable qualities, and that they’d rather spend time with them. Other studies showed that similar flimsy manipulations lead in-group members to rate themselves as more different from one another than out-group members. It appears that the partitioning of people into mutually exclusive categories activates the perception that “we” are better than “they” even when there is no rational basis for it. That’s just the way “we” are.

When we think about organizing our social world, the implication of in-group/out-group bias is clear. We have a stubborn tendency to misjudge outsiders and hence diminish our abilities to forge new, cooperative, and potentially valuable social relations.

Racism is a form of negative social judgment that arises from a combination of belief perseverance, out-group bias, categorization error, and faulty inductive reasoning. We hear about a particular undesirable trait or act on the part of an individual, and jump to the false conclusion that this is something completely predictable for someone of that ethnic or national background. The form of the argument is:

1.0. The media report that Mr. A did this.

1.1. I don’t like this thing he did.

1.2. Mr. A is from the country of Awfulania.

1.3. Therefore, everyone from Awfulania must do this thing that I don’t like.

There is nothing wrong of course with statements 1.0 or 1.1. Statement 1.2 seems to violate (flout) the Gricean maxim of relevance, but this is not, in and of itself, a logical violation. Noticing where someone is from is neither moral nor immoral in and of itself. It exists as a fact, outside morality. How one uses the information is where the morality enters the picture. One might notice a person’s religion or country of origin as a step toward rapprochement, toward better understanding of cultural differences. Or one may use it for racist generalizations. From a logical standpoint, the real problem occurs at 1.3, a generalization from a single specific instance. For a number of historical and cognitive reasons, humans evolved an unfortunate tendency to do this, and in some instances it is adaptive. I eat a piece of fruit I’ve never eaten before, I get sick, I then assume (inductive reasoning) that all pieces of this particular fruit are potentially inedible. We make generalizations about entire classes of people or things because the brain is a giant inferencing machine, and it uses whatever data it has in its attempt to ensure our survival.

In the late 1970s, social psychologist Mick Rothbart taught a class on race relations that had approximately equal numbers of black and white students. A white student would often begin a question with the preface, “Don’t black people feel . . .” and Mick would think to himself, “That’s a good question.” But if a black student started a question with “Don’t white people feel . . .” Mick found himself thinking, “What do they mean, ‘white people’? There are all kinds of white people, some conservative, some liberal, some Jewish, some gentile, some sensitive to the problems of minorities, and some not. ‘White people’ is too broad and meaningless a category to use, and there is no way I can respond to . . . the question . . . in its existing form.”

Of course the same thoughts were likely going through the minds of the black students in the class when the question began with “Don’t black people feel . . .” In cases of in-group/out-group bias, each group thinks of the other as homogeneous and monolithic, and each group views itself as variegated and complex. You’re probably thinking that a cure for this is increased exposure—if members of groups get to know one another better, the stereotypes will fall away. This is true to a large degree, but in-group/out-group bias, being so deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology, is hard to shake completely. In one experiment, men and women judging one another as a group still fell prey to this cognitive bias. “It is impressive,” Mick Rothbart wrote, “to have demonstrated this phenomenon with two groups who have almost continual contact, and a wealth of information about one another.” Once we have a stereotype, we tend not to reevaluate the stereotype; we instead discard any new, disconfirming evidence as “exceptions.” This is a form of belief perseveration.

The serious problems of famine, war, and climate change that we face will require solutions involving all of the stakeholders in the future of the world. No one country can solve these issues, and no collection of countries can if they view each other as out-groups rather than in-groups. You might say the fate of the world depends (among other things) on abolishing out-group bias. In one particular case, it did.

October 1962 was perhaps the time in world history when we were closest to complete destruction of the planet, as President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev were engaged in a nuclear standoff known in the United States as the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Or, as the Soviets called it, the Caribbean Crisis of 1962.)

A key aspect of the conflict’s resolution was a back-channel, private communication between JFK and Khrushchev. This was the height of the cold war. Officials on each side believed that the other was trying to take over the world and couldn’t be trusted. Kennedy saw himself and all Americans as the in-group and Khrushchev and the Soviets as the out-group. All of the biases we’ve seen accrued: Americans saw themselves as trustworthy, and any aggressive behaviors by the United States (even as judged by international standards) were justified; any aggressive behaviors by the Soviets showed their true nature as vicious, heartless, and irrational agents bent on destruction.

The turning point came when Khrushchev broke through all of the bravado and rhetoric and asked Kennedy to consider things from his perspective, to use a little empathy. He implored Kennedy several times to “try to put yourself in our place.” He then pointed out their similarities, that both of them were leaders of their respective countries: “If you are really concerned about the peace and welfare of your people, and this is your responsibility as President, then I, as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, am concerned for my people. Moreover, the preservation of world peace should be our joint concern, since if, under contemporary conditions, war should break out, it would be a war not only between the reciprocal claims, but a world wide cruel and destructive war.”

In effect, Khrushchev pointed to a group in which he and Kennedy were both members—leaders of major world powers. In so doing, he turned Kennedy into an in-group member from an out-group member. This was the turning point in the crisis, opening up the possibility for a compromise solution that resolved the crisis on October 26, 1962.

Military action is often misguided. During World War II, the Nazis bombed London, hoping to induce a surrender; it had the opposite effect, increasing the British resolve to resist. In 1941, the Japanese tried to prevent the United States from entering the war by attacking Pearl Harbor, which backfired when it impelled the United States to enter the war. In the 1980s, the U.S. government provided funds for military action against Nicaragua to obtain political reform. During late 2013 and early 2014, three years after the start of the Egyptian revolt for democracy, the acting government was locked in a vicious cycle of terrorism and repression with the Muslim Brotherhood that hardened the determination of both sides.

Why are these interventions so often unsuccessful? Because of in-group and out-group bias, we tend to think that coercion will be more effective with our enemies than with ourselves, and conciliation will be more effective with ourselves than our enemies. Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, “When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world . . . Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.”

When We Want to Escape a Social World

In an organized and civilized society, we depend on one another in a variety of interdependent ways. We assume that people won’t throw their garbage willy-nilly on the sidewalk in front of our house, that neighbors will let us know if they see suspicious activity when we’re out of town, and that if we need urgent medical help, someone will stop to dial 9-1-1. The act of living in cities and towns together is fundamentally an act of cooperation. The government, at various levels (federal, state, county, municipal), passes laws to define civil behavior, but at best they can address only the most extreme cases at the margins of civility. We rely on each other not just to observe the law but to be basically helpful and cooperative beyond the law. Few jurisdictions have a law that says if you see Cedric’s four-year-old fall off her bicycle in the street, you must help her or notify Cedric, but it would be widely seen as monstrous if you didn’t. (Argentina is one country that legally requires assisting those in need.)

Nevertheless, social interactions are complex and a number of experiments have demonstrated that we tend either to act in our own self-interest or just plain don’t want to get involved. Take the case, for example, of witnessing a mugging, holdup, or other dangerous situation. There are clear societal norms about helping the victim in a situation like this. But there are also perfectly justifiable fears about what might happen to the person who intervenes. Pitted against societal norms and cooperative inclinations are several psychological forces that pull us toward inaction. As the social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané say, “‘I didn’t want to get involved’ is a familiar comment, and behind it lies fears of physical harm, public embarrassment, involvement with police procedures, lost work days and jobs, and other unknown dangers.”

In addition, there are many circumstances in which we are not the only ones witnessing an event where intervention seems called for, such as in public places. As a highly social species living in close proximity with thousands of others, we want to fit in. This desire in turn causes us to look about to others for cues about what is acceptable in a given situation. We see someone across the street who appears to be getting mugged. We look around and see dozens of other people viewing the same situation and none of them are doing anything about it. “Maybe,” we think to ourselves, “this isn’t as it seems. None of these other people are reacting, and maybe they know something I don’t. Maybe it isn’t really a mugging; it’s just two people who know each other having an impromptu wrestling match. I should respect their privacy.” Unknown to us, the dozens of other people are also looking around and having a similar internal dialogue, and reaching the same conclusion that it is against the societal norm to get involved in this particular conflict. These are not just textbook problems. In 2011, sixty-one-year-old Walter Vance, a man with a heart condition, died after collapsing in a Target store in West Virginia while hundreds of shoppers walked by and even over him. In 2013, shoppers at a QuickStop convenience store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, stepped over a man who had been shot and lay dying in the doorway. The cashier failed to check if the victim was alive, continuing to serve customers instead.

This tendency to not get involved is driven by three powerful, interrelated psychological principles. One is the strong desire to conform to others’ behavior in the hope that it will allow us to gain acceptance within our social group, to be seen as cooperative and agreeable. The second is social comparison—we tend to examine our behavior in terms of others.

The third force pushing us toward inaction is diffusion of responsibility. This is based on very natural and ingrained feelings about equity and wanting to punish freeloaders: “Why should I stick my neck out if all these other people aren’t—they could do something about it just as well as I could.” Darley and Latané conducted a classic experiment designed to replicate a real-life medical emergency. Participants were nearly three times as likely to seek rapid help for a victim having a seizure when they thought they were the only witnesses than when they thought four other people were also there. Diffusion of responsibility extends to diffusion of blame for inaction, and the very real possibility that somebody else, unknown to us, has already initiated a helping action, for example, calling the police. As Darley and Latané say,

When only one bystander is present in an emergency, if help is to come, it must come from him. Although he may choose to ignore it (out of concern for his personal safety, or desires “not to get involved”), any pressure to intervene focuses uniquely on him. When there are several observers present, however, the pressures to intervene do not focus on any one of the observers; instead the responsibility for intervention is shared among all the onlookers and is not unique to any one. As a result, no one helps.

Of course this is not a particularly admirable form of moral reasoning, but it does capture an essential part of human nature and, admittedly, is not our proudest moment as a species. We are not just a social species but often a selfish one. As one participant in the Darley and Latané experiment said, with respect to the person having a seizure, “It’s just my kind of luck, something has to happen to me!” That is, she failed to empathize with the victim, considering only the inconvenience to her in having to be impeded by a crisis. Thankfully, we are not all this way, and not in every situation. Humans and other animals are often unselfish. Geese will come to the aid of one another at great personal risk; vervet monkeys broadcast alarm calls when predators are near, greatly increasing their own visibility to those predators, and meerkats stand guard for predators while the rest of their pack are eating. What is the neurochemical mechanism that supports this altruistic sentinel behavior? Oxytocin—the same social-affiliative hormone that increases trust and social cooperation among humans.

The distinction between our selfish and altruistic responses can be seen as a categorization error. When we are engaging in conformity, social comparison, or diffusion of responsibility, we are categorizing ourselves with the larger group as opposed to the victim. We see ourselves as standing with them, and they become our in-group. We fail to identify with the victim, who becomes a mistrusted, or at the very least misunderstood, member of an out-group. This is why Darley and Latané found that so many of their participants raced to help when they thought they were the sole witnesses—with no social group to categorize themselves in, they were free to identify with the victim. Knowing these principles can help us to overcome them, to empathize with the victim, and to squash the tendency to say, “I don’t want to get involved.”

Your social world is your social world. Who can say how to organize it? We are all increasingly interconnected, and our happiness and well-being is increasingly interdependent. One measure of the success of a society is how engaged its citizens are in contributing to the common good. If you see an Amber Alert on the highway and then see a matching license plate, call the police. Try to be agreeable. For all the digitization of our social life, we are still all in this together.